NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

AND  OTHER  STUDIES  IN 

THE  TONE-POETRY 

OF  TODAY 


BY  THE   SAME  AUTHOR 

THE  MUSIC  OF  TO-MORROW 
AND  OTHER  STUDIES 

ASPECTS  OF  MODERN  OPERA 

STRAUSS'  "SALOME":  A  Guide 
to  the  Opera 

EDWARD   M^AcDOWELL:    An 

Illustrated  Biography. 


MUSIC  LIBRARY 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


NATURE  IN  MUSIC 

AND    OTHER    STUDIES    IN 

THE  TONE-POETRY 

OF  TODAY 


BY 

LAWRENCE  OILMAN 

Author  of 

"The  Music  of  To-morrow,"  "Aspects  of  Modem  Opera," 

"Edward  MacDowell:  A  Study,"    "Phases  of  Modem  Music, 

Etc..  Etc. 


NEW  YORK:  JOHN  LANE  COMPANY 
LONDON:  JOHN  LANE,  THE  BODLEY  HEAD 
TORONTO:   BELL   &   COCKBURN  ::  MCMXIV 


Copjrright,  1914,  by 
JOHN  LANE  COMPANY 


'And  shall  not  Loveliness  be  loved  forever  ?  " 

— Euripides. 


3Jr; 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I.    Nature  in  Music 9 

Tonal  Landscapes ii 

Music  and  the  Sea 73 

II.     Death  and  the  Musicians   ...  93 

III.  Strauss  and  the  Greeks  ....  109 

IV.  The  Question  of  Opera  in  Eng- 

lish    133 

V.    A  Note  on  Montemezzi  .    .    .    .  153 

VI.    The  Place  of  Grieg 167 

VII.    A  Musical  Cosmopolite   ....  187 


NATURE  IN  MUSIC 


NATURE  IN   MUSIC 

"Nature  consists  not  only  in  itself  objectively, 
but  at  least  just  as  much  in  its  subjective  reflection 
from  the  person,  spirit,  age,  looking  at  it,  in  the 
midst  of  it,  and  absorbing  it:  faithfully  sends  back 
the  characteristic  beliefs  of  the  time  or  individual 
.  .  .  falls  like  a  flat  elastic  veil  on  a  face  or  like 
the  moulding  plaster  on  a  statue." — Walt  Whit- 
man. 

Tonal  Landscapes 

"How  long  will  you  let  the  houses  press 
you  down?  How  long  will  you  shut 
yourself  up  in  the  prison  of  smoky 
cities?"  cried  St.  Jerome  to  the  monk 
Heliodorus,  while  praising  the  beauty  of 
God's  solitudes.  In  this  exhortation  the 
excellent  hermit  was  illustrating,  some 
fifteen  centuries  in  advance,  the  theory 
of  an  ingenious  philosopher  of  our  own 
II 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

day,  M,  Pierre  Janet,  who  holds  that 
those  who,  at  different  times  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  world's  civilization,  have 
manifested  a  strong  attraction  toward  the 
natural  world,  have  always  been  persons 
of  a  definite  and  particular  type:  emo- 
tional, subject  to  exaltation  of  mood,  im- 
patient of  hampering  traditions,  essen- 
tially anti-conventional.  Mr.  Havelock 
Ellis,  in  his  study  of  the  psychology  of 
the  love  of  wild  Nature,  characterises  all 
such  persons  as,  in  a  greater  or  less  de- 
gree, "temperamentally  exceptional."  In 
the  strongest  and  simplest  manifestations 
of  the  type,  these  lovers  of  wild  Nature 
have  been  persons  who  were  instinctively 
repelled  by  their  ordinary  environment; 
"the  real  world  of  their  average  fellow- 
men  seemed  to  them  unreal,  and  they 
were  conscious  of  a  painful  sense  of  in- 
adequacy toward  it;  they  sought  new  and 
stronger  stimulants,  a  new  Heaven  and  a 
new  earth." 

This  modern  view  of  the  cause  and  his- 

12 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

tory  of  the  love  of  Nature  thus  affords  a 
comfortable  meeting-ground  for  two  op- 
posing philosophic  camps :  for  those  who, 
on  the  one  hand,  have  held  the  tradi- 
tional view  that  an  imaginative  suscepti- 
bility to  Nature  originated  with  Rous- 
seau and  the  nineteenth-century  Roman- 
tics, and  those  who  hold  that,  on  the  con- 
trary, the  natural  world  has  always,  in 
all  ages,  had  its  allure  for  the  human 
imagination.  Thus  Chateaubriand,  who 
had  small  use  for  mountains  except  as 
"the  sources  of  rivers,  a  barrier  against 
the  horrors  of  war,"  is  balanced  by 
Petrarch,  who,  climbing  Mont  Ventoux, 
in  Provence,  in  1335,  observed  that  his 
soul  "rose  to  lofty  contemplations"  on 
the  summit.  Goldsmith  objected  that  in 
Scotland  "hills  and  rocks  intercept  every 
prospect";  yet  Milton  had  savoured  with 
extraordinary  vividness  the  beauty  and 
the  awe  of  external  nature — what  magic 
there  is  in  his 

13 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"...  Sabean  odours  from  the  spicy  shore 
Of  Araby  the  blest." 

We  are  thus  invited  to  agree  that  at 
all  times — though  only  in  the  case  of  a 
few  uncommon  persons — the  fascination 
of  the  natural  world  has  laid  its  hold 
upon  a  certain  type  of  mind  and  spirit; 
and  that  Rousseau  and  the  Romantics, 
although  they  were  not  discoverers  of  a 
new  wonder-realm,  yet  opened  wide  its 
gates  to  their  own  and  to  succeeding  gen- 
erations. We  are  to  find  in  Jerome,  and 
in  St.  Augustine  when  he  is  rejoicing  in 
''the  manifold  and  various  loveliness  of 
sky  and  sea  and  earth,"  confessors  of  the 
same  passion  for  the  picturesque  that, 
centuries  later,  swayed  such  visionary 
rebels  as  Rousseau  and  Wordsworth,  By- 
ron and  Shelley,  Keats  and  Whitman; 
and  we  perceive  that  when  the  punctil- 
ious and  gentle  Addison  declared,  in 
1705,  that  the  Alps  as  seen  from  the  Lake 
of  Geneva  formed  "one  of  the  most  ir- 
14 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

regular  misshapen  scenes  in  the  world," 
he  was  merely  anticipating,  for  example, 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  who,  two  hundred 
years  later,  could  say  of  wild  scenery  that 
it  "derives  half  its  charm  from  the  occult 
sense  of  the  human  life  and  social  forms 
moulded  upon  it,"  and  who  shrank  from 
the  Alps  as  being  "unbearably  stern," 
tolerable  only  by  virtue  of  "the  pictur- 
esque society  preserved  among  its  folds." 
For  neither  the  world  nor  the  heart  of 
man  alters  greatly  during  the  years, 
though  we  look  from  within  outward 
through  eternally  different  eyes. 

The  strongest  appeal  of  natural  beauty 
has  always,  then,  been  chiefly  to  indi- 
viduals of  emotional  habit,  and  especially 
to  those  of  untrammelled  imagination  and 
non-conformist  tendencies:  in  other 
words,  to  poetically  minded  radicals  in 
all  times  and  regions.  It  is  probable  that 
the  curious  and  enlightened  inquirer, 
bearing  in  mind  these  facts,  would  not  be 
surprised  to  find,  in  studying  the  various 
15 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

expressions  of  this  attraction  as  they  are 
recorded  in  the  arts,  that  the  uniquely- 
sensitive  and  eloquent  art  of  music  has 
long  been  the  handmaid  of  the  Nature- 
lover;  and  he  would  be  prepared  to  find 
the  Nature-lover  himself  appearing  often 
in  the  guise  of  that  inherently  emotional 
and  often  heterodox  being,  the  music- 
maker. 

This  is,  indeed,  the  case.  The  history 
of  creative  music  is  rich  in  attempted 
transcriptions  of  what  Henry  More 
called  "the  Outworld."  There  have 
been  landscapists  in  music  ever  since  Don 
Marco  Ucellini,  court  conductor  to  the 
Duke  of  Modena,  composed  in  1669  his 
"Sinfonie  Boscareccie,"  or  "Wood  Sym- 
phonies." Even  before  him,  the  English- 
man John  Mundy  was  writing  pieces  for 
the  virginal  which  constituted  a  vague 
and  tentative  order  of  descriptive  nature- 
painting — as,  for  example,  a  "Fantasia" 
wherein  he  assumes  to  portray  "A  Clear 
Day,"  "Lightning,"  "Thunder,"  "Calm 
16 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Weather."  Indeed,  a  large  part  of  the 
early  history  of  instrumental  programme- 
music  is  concerned  with  chronicling  more 
or  less  determined  attempts  at  landscape- 
painting  on  the  part  of  various  composers 
enamoured  of  picturesque  titles.  The  stu- 
dent delving  in  the  music  of  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries  will  find 
a  long  succession  of  "Forest"  symphonies, 
"Spring"  symphonies,  and  pastoral  pieces 
of  a  varying  degree  of  naivete :  as  certain 
harpsichord  pieces  of  the  Frenchman 
Couperin, — "Les  Pavots,"  "Le  Verger 
Fleuri,"  "Les  Guirlands,"  "Le  Reveille 
Matin,"  "Le  Point  du  Jour,"  "Les  Ber- 
geries,"  "Les  Abeilles";  or  the  famous 
"L' Allegro,  II  Penseroso,  ed  II  Mode- 
rato"  of  Handel,  with  its  attempted  de- 
notement of  running  streams,  winds,  bird 
songs;  or  the  singularly  elaborate  tonal 
portraiture  of  the  Venetian,  Antonio 
Vivaldi  (1680- 1743),  who,  in  his  "The 
Four  Seasons,"  discourses  with  remark- 
able and  explicit  detail  of  such  matters 
17 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

as  Spring  and  its  "flowering  meadows" 
and  "rustling  leaves,"  the  heat  and  lan- 
guor of  Summer,  the  hunts  and  harvest 
festivals  of  Autumn,  the  rigors,  "terrible 
wind,"  ice  and  cold  of  Winter;  or  the 
"Portrait  musical  de  la  Nature"  of  Jus- 
tin Heinrich  Knecht,  which  anticipated 
Beethoven's  Pastoral  Symphony  by  a 
quarter  of  a  century;  and  he  will  of 
course  note  the  naive  pictorialism  of 
Johann  Sebastian  Bach,  and  the  equally 
ingenuous  Nature-painting  to  be  found 
in  the  oratorios  of  the  estimable  Josef 
Haydn. 

Perhaps  it  will  not  be  amiss  at  this 
juncture  to  recall  what  has  been  formu- 
lated by  the  aestheticians  as  to  the  meth- 
ods of  the  composer  who  essays  in  his 
music  a  suggestion  of  external  things — a 
landscape  or  a  seascape,  a  sunset  or  a 
wind  over  the  sea,  or  the  odours  of  night 
in  the  fields. 

An  English  theorist,  Mr.  William 
Wallace,  has  concisely  defined  and  char- 
i8 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

acterised  this  kind  of  tone-painting  by 
describing  it  as  that  order  of  music 
"which  attempts  to  excite  a  mental  image 
by  means  of  an  auditory  impression." 
The  writer  of  delineative  or  suggestive 
music — "programme  music,"  as  it  is  un- 
satisfactorily but  conveniently  designated 
— proceeds  somewhat,  as  we  know,  after 
this  fashion:  By  associating  with  his  mu- 
sic a  title,  motto,  or  descriptive  passage, 
he  establishes  a  receptive  condition  in  the 
mind  of  the  hearer;  his  task  is  then  to 
address  the  imagination  of  this  auditor  by 
the  use  of  certain  analogies,  certain  mu- 
sical symbols,  which  will  express  and  ful- 
fil the  concept  which  the  title  or  super- 
scription of  the  piece  has  evoked. 

We  have  spoken  of  "musical  symbols." 
There  are  two  fundamentally  different 
types  of  musical  idea.  On  the  one  hand, 
we  have  the  kind  of  musical  idea  which 
has  no  other  reason  for  being  than  to  em- 
body an  idea  of  beautiful  utterance  in  the 
mind  of  the  composer.  On  the  other 
19 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

hand,  we  have  the  type  of  idea  which  is 
deliberately  conceived  and  fashioned  to 
excite,  in  Mr.  Wallace's  phrase,  "a  men- 
tal image" — either  by  direct  tonal  imita- 
tion, as  of  bird-notes,  thunder,  the  shriek 
and  whistle  of  wind;  or  more  subtly,  as  in 
the  suggestion  of  flowing  water,  dawn, 
moonlight,  cloud  forms,  by  imaginative 
analogies  of  colour  and  design;  or,  yet 
more  subtly  and  reconditely,  to  communi- 
cate a  particular  mood,  a  definite  state  of 
feeling.  It  is  of  course  true  that  if  an 
idea  of  this  latter  type  issues  from  the  cre- 
ative imagination  of  a  genius,  it  will  be 
valuable  and  potent  as  music  in  addition 
to  its  fitness  and  success  as  an  expressional 
agent;  but  it  will  be  so  only,  as  it  were, 
accidentally.  For  an  example  of  the  first 
type  of  idea,  one  might  instance  the  open- 
ing measures  of  the  Andante  of  Beetho- 
ven's Fifth  Symphony,  or  the  famous 
oboe  melody  in  the  slow  movement 
of  Schubert's  Symphony  in  C-major, 
or   any   page   from   the   chamber-music 

20 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

of  the  classicists.  Examples  of  the 
second  type — ideas  having  an  extra- 
musical  intention — are  nowhere  more 
perfect  and  abundant  than  in  the  works 
of  that  supreme  master  of  tonal  portrait- 
ure, Richard  Wagner;  for  the  "leading- 
motives"  of  the  Wagner  music-dramas 
range  through  the  entire  gamut  of  tonal 
expression,  from  delineation  of  externals 
— the  winds,  waters,  landscapes  of  the 
earth,  and  the  outward  aspects  and  con- 
cerns of  man — to  an  exposition  of  the  se- 
cret processes  of  the  human  heart  and  the 
loftiest  aspirations  of  the  spirit. 

But  let  us  contrast  two  specific  exam- 
ples of  both  methods:  the  method  of  the 
"absolute"  musician,  and  the  method  of 
the  writer  of  music  that  seeks  to  delin- 
eate or  suggest.  For  the  first,  consider 
that  perfect  flower  of  the  genius  of  Jo- 
hannes Brahms,  the  lovely  and  meditative 
Intermezzo  in  E-major  from  the  set  of 
piano  pieces  known  as  Opus  1 16  (No.  2) . 
Here  is  a  perfect  example  of  "absolute" 
21 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

music — self-contained,  wholly  single  in 
intention,  having  no  other  aim  or  func- 
tion than  to  discharge  the  mind  of  the 
composer  of  its  burden  of  inspiration. 
Now  contrast  with  this  the  nobly  poetic 
piano  piece,  "In  Deep  Woods,"  of  Ed- 
ward MacDowell,  from  the  group  of 
tone-poems  which  he  calls  "New  Eng- 
land Idyls."  Here,  too,  is  music  of 
lovely  and  meditative  beauty;  but,  unlike 
the  Brahms  piece,  it  is  not  single  in  in- 
tention. To  begin  with,  it  bears  a  title 
deliberately  intended  to  engage  the  im- 
agination of  the  hearer;  and  it  has  also 
this  superscription,  designed  to  enforce 
and  particularise  the  significance  of  the 
music: 

"Above,  long  slender  shafts  of  opal  flame; 
Below,  the  dim  cathedral  aisles: 
The  silent  mystery  of  immortal  things 
Broods  o'er  the  woods  at  eve." 

It  is  evident  at  the  start  that  here  is 
music  with   a   purpose  beyond   that  of 

22 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

making  an  effect  of  sheer  niusical  beauty. 
That  purpose  is  to  effect,  by  means  of 
suggestive  analogies  of  character  — 
breadth  and  solemnity  of  movement,  mys- 
terious majesty  in  harmonic  colouring 
and  melodic  design — an  enrichment  and 
intensification  of  the  images  aroused  in 
the  mind  of  the  hearer  by  the  title  and 
superscription  of  the  piece.  In  brief,  it 
aims  to  paint  a  picture  and  provoke  an  as- 
sociated mood.  Thus  it  has  at  once  a 
more  complex  intention  and  a  more  com- 
plex effect  than  has  the  typical  piece  of 
Brahms.  The  material  with  which 
Brahms  dealt  in  his  Intermezzo  was 
exclusively  musical  material;  whereas 
MacDowell  in  his  vivid  little  tone-poem 
exerts  not  only  that  inarticulate  eloquence 
which  belongs  peculiarly  to  music,  but 
also  the  concrete,  precise,  and  definite 
eloquence  of  the  poet,  and  the  pictorial 
function  of  the  painter.  Indeed,  the  de- 
tractors of  this  very  modern  but  also  very 
ancient  kind  of  music  deprecate  it  upon 
23 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

precisely  that  ground:  that  it  is  not 
^'self-contained";  that  it  needs  the  aid 
of  words — a  text,  a  motto,  title,  su- 
perscription— in  order  that  it  may  ac- 
complish its  object  and  speak  definitely 
to  the  imagination.  The  answer  is,  of 
course,  that  this  order  of  music  is  a  com- 
plex form,  like  the  opera,  the  oratorio, 
and  the  song,  none  of  which  is  independ- 
ent of  a  text  or  commentary  of  some  sort. 
The  programmatic  piano  piece  or  sym- 
phony is  precisely  as  "self-contained" 
and  as  "pure"  as  is  the  song  or  the  music- 
drama.  Each  is  dependent  for  its  full 
realisation  upon  an  element  external  to 
itself:  the  song,  upon  words  in  the  mouth 
of  the  singer;  the  opera,  upon  words 
sung,  action  represented,  or,  very  often, 
upon  so  flagrantly  external  a  thing  as  the 
display  and  movement  of  scenery.  The 
writer  of  descriptive  piano  music  or  or- 
chestral pieces  merely  presents  his  de- 
fining element — his  text — in  the  form  of 
a  published  title,  superscription,  or  "ar- 
24 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

gument,"  and  then  proceeds  to  enlarge 
upon  it.  In  the  song,  the  opera,  the  ora- 
torio, the  definition  of  the  music  syn- 
chronises with  its  actual  performance; 
in  the  tone-poem  for  orchestra  or  piano, 
the  definition  is  stated  in  advance.  The 
music  written  by  Wagner  to  depict  the 
magic  flames  of  Loge  bears  the  same 
necessitous  and  organic  relationship  to 
the  coloured  steam  of  the  stage  mechanic 
as  the  music  of  Debussy's  "Apres-midi 
d'un  Faune"  bears  to  the  poem  of  Mal- 
larme  which  he  indicates  in  the  title  of 
that  famous  and  exquisite  orchestral  idyl. 
The  musical  landscapist  is,  as  we  have 
seen,  a  very  familiar  apparition  in  mu- 
sical history;  but  he  has  not  always  been 
an  impressive  figure  there.  His  early  at- 
tempts at  nature-painting  were  for  the 
most  part  crude,  childish,  and  inept — 
either  imitation  of  the  baldest  and  fee- 
blest kind,  or  mere  musical  sentimental- 
ising, barren  of  artistic  dignity  or  visual- 
ising imagination.  There  were  giants  in 
25 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

those  days,  but  they  were  excellent  and 
memorable  in  other  fields  than  that  of 
tonal  landscape-painting.  It  is  true  that 
there  were  exceptions.  In  the  nature- 
music  of  Couperin,  Rameau,  Gluck,  and 
Bach,  for  example,  there  are  admirable 
passages  of  descriptive  writing.  Later,  in 
the  hands  of  the  resourceful  and  ingenious 
Haydn,  the  art  of  naturalistic  depiction 
assumed  a  more  important  aspect.  In 
"The  Creation"  and  "The  Seasons"  there 
is  nature-painting  which  is  often  remark- 
able for  its  genuine  power  and  felicity. 
Haydn  was,  indeed,  considerably  more 
noteworthy  as  a  writer  of  programme- 
music  than  as  a  composer  of  gracefully 
superficial  symphonies,  sonatas,  and 
string  quartettes,  despite  the  importance 
of  his  contribution  to  the  history  of  mu- 
sical form.  Still  later  we  find  the  Ro- 
mantic composers  of  the  early  nineteenth 
century  essaying,  with  various  degrees  of 
impressiveness,  tonal  portraiture  inspired 
by  what  the  poet  of  "The  Excursion" 
26 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

piously  called  ''God's  works  in  His  vis- 
ible creation" — as  (for  random  instances) 
Beethoven  in  his  "Pastoral"  symphony; 
Berlioz  in  his  'Fantastic"  and  "Harold  in 
Italy"  symphonies;  Spohr  in  his  "Con- 
secration of  Sound";  Mendelssohn  in  his 
music  to  "A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream" 
and  his  perpetually  delightful  overtures; 
Schubert  in  his  songs;  Schumann  in  his 
"Spring"  symphony  and  his  "Forest 
Scenes"  for  piano. 

But  for  tonal  landscape-painting  in  its 
finer  estate  one  must  look  to  the  music 
of  the  last  fifty  years — at  its  best  it  is 
peculiarly  a  modern  art.  The  marvel- 
lous increase  in  expressional  efficiency 
which  is  the  most  salient  result  of  the  last 
half-century  of  musical  progress  has  had 
no  more  fortunate  issue  than  the  disclos- 
ure of  means  whereby  the  composer  of 
imagination  has  been  enabled  to  realise 
his  conceptions  with  a  measure  of  elo- 
quence undreamed  of  by  his  predecessors. 
The  harmonic  eff^ects  which  are  to-day 
27 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

at  the  disposal  of  any  graduate  from  a 
conservatory  class  in  composition  simply 
did  not  exist  for  Schumann — not  to  speak 
of  Beethoven  or  Mozart;  for  in  musical 
art  the  innovation  of  yesterday  is  the 
platitude  of  to-day.  Certain  forms  of 
musical  expression  w^hich,  when  first  used 
by  path-breakers  like  Chopin,  Liszt,  and 
Wagner,  occasioned  shrill  protests  from 
the  critical  conservatives — who  alone  are 
timeless  and  unchanging — have  now 
passed  into  the  common  language  of  the 
art,  and  are  at  the  service  of  any  tyro 
who  has  learned  how  to  put  notes  to- 
gether. 

No  true  analogy  for  this  condition  is 
to  be  found,  as  might  be  supposed,  in 
the  case  of  the  poet  or  the  artist,  by 
whom  words  and  pigments  may  undeni- 
ably be  manipulated  to  novel  and  unex- 
pected ends.  In  the  case  of  the  com- 
poser, it  is  the  actual  substance  of  his 
art  which  is  added  to  and  enriched  by 
the  practice  of  successive  generations  of 
28 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

creative  pioneers.  While  the  artist  in 
words  must,  in  our  day,  work  with  vir- 
tually the  same  materials  that  were 
used  by  Keats  and  Shelley,  over  whom 
he  has  in  this  respect  no  fundamental 
advantage,  the  contemporary  music- 
maker  is  very  differently  circumstanced. 
He  has,  at  the  start,  as  important  an  ad- 
vantage over  his  predecessor  of  a  century 
ago  as  the  modern  poet  would  possess  if 
that  part  of  the  vocabulary  of  the  Eng- 
lish language  which  is  poetically  avail- 
able were  unimaginably  enlarged  by  the 
accretion  of  a  mass  of  wholly  new  words, 
as  potent  and  magical  as  the  old.  Mr. 
Yeats  and  Mr.  Stephen  Phillips  can,  of 
course,  speak  of  winds  and  waters  with  a 
beauty  and  an  emotion  which  suffer  no 
impairment  from  the  fact  that  they  are 
using  practically  the  same  verbal  mate- 
rials that  were  used  by  Keats  and  Shelley. 
But  whereas  the  modern  music-maker 
can  speak  of  winds  and  waters  through 
the  forms  of  utterance  that  served  Beet- 

20 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

hoven  and  Schubert  and  Schumann,  he 
can  also — and  herein  lies  the  incalculable 
superiority  of  his  medium — speak  of 
them  in  terms  that  are,  in  essence,  abso- 
lutely new.  He  must  still,  of  course, 
work  within  the  limits  of  a  few  dozen 
tones  of  varying  pitch;  but  these  corre- 
spond, not  to  the  words  of  language,  but 
to  Its  alphabet;  and  from  this  tonal  alpha- 
bet new  words — harmonic  and  melodic 
forms — are  being  evolved  with  a  rapidity 
and  profusion  for  which  in  no  other 
kind  of  aesthetic  language  is  there  any 
comparison.  The  most  uninspired  music- 
wright  of  to-day  can,  by  the  employment 
of  certain  harmonic  expedients,  produce 
effects  which  Beethoven  would  have  bar- 
tered his  soul  to  be  able  to  achieve.  The 
harmonic  effects  with  which  Debussy  is 
enabled  to  paint  the  visionary  landscape 
of  his"Apres-midi  d'un  Faune" ;  the  won- 
derful picture  of  nightfall  in  upland  soli- 
tudes which  is  limned  by  Vincent  d'Indy 
in  his  tone-poem,  "Jour  d'ete  a  la  Mon- 
30 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

tagne" ;  the  malign  and  dread-enwrapped 
landscape  which  forms  the  background 
of  Charles  Martin  Loeffler's  setting  of 
Verlaine's  poem,  "Le  Son  du  Cor  s'afflige 
vers  les  Bois" ;  the  startlingly  vivid  chords 
which  enable  MacDowell  to  suggest  the 
glittering  splendour  of  this  "Wandering 
Iceberg" :  these  are  concrete  examples, 
chosen  quite  at  random,  of  a  utilisation 
of  certain  means  of  musical  expression 
which  not  only  were  undreamt  of  by  the 
composers  of  a  century  ago,  but  which 
simply  did  not  exist  for  their  utilisation. 
They  are  woven  out  of  a  wholly  new 
tonal  stufif,  peculiar  to  our  time  and  use. 

It  will  thus  be  evident  why,  as  I  have 
said,  it  has  been  possible  for  musical 
landscape-painting  to  achieve  an  unex- 
ampled pitch  of  expressiveness  within  the 
last  fifty  years,  and  why  it  is  peculiarly 
a  modern  art,  an  art  of  our  own  time. 

Since  there  is  everything  in  Wagner — 
the  most  comprehensive  master  of  mu- 
sical utterance  that  the  world  has  yet 
31 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

known — it  is  natural  that  his  scores 
should  contain  Nature-painting  of  an  ex- 
ceptional kind.  Wagner  ranged  freely 
over  the  whole  field  of  human  conscious- 
ness and  experience.  He  looked  into  the 
heart  of  man,  and  wrote,  with  unequalled 
poignancy,  of  its  griefs  and  joys,  its  pas- 
sions and  aspirations.  He  looked,  too, 
outward  upon  the  created  earth,  and 
he  responded  lovingly  to  its  multi- 
form phases — its  woods,  meadows,  hills, 
streams,  gardens;  its  sunrises  and  sunsets; 
the  pageant  of  the  seasons;  wind,  rain, 
mists,  storms:  he  was  alive  to  them  all, 
and  he  has  celebrated  many  of  their  as- 
pects in  music  that  is  not  merely  vivid  and 
graphic  in  its  pictorial  quality,  but  deeply 
poetical  and  often  of  superlative  beauty. 
It  would  be  difficult  to  parallel  in  the 
whole  range  of  naturalistic  tone-painting 
the  exquisite  eloquence  and  the  ravishing 
beauty  of  the  music  which  evokes,  as 
preparation  for  the  nocturnal  meeting  of 
Tristan  and  Isolde  in  King  Mark's  gar- 
32 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

den,  the  spell  of  that  nameless  enchant- 
ment which  the  night  has  ever  held  for 
lovers,  dreamers,  and  poets.  Nor  is  it 
easy  to  name  anything  that  surpasses  such 
achievements  as  the  picturing  of  sunlit 
and  tranquil  meadows  in  the  "Good  Fri- 
day Spell"  of  "Parsifal,"  or  the  forest 
music,  storm  music,  and  water  music  in 
"The  Ring."  These  are  but  a  few  in- 
stances of  the  extraordinary  powers  of 
vision  and  presentment  which  we  find 
constantly  exercised  in  all  of  Wagner's 
essays  at  Nature-painting. 

But  though  Wagner  was  the  first  of 
those  modern  composers  who  have  made 
the  art  of  naturalistic  tone-poetry,  with- 
in the  last  half-century,  a  unique  and  un- 
exampled thing,  he  was  considerably  less 
remarkable  as  a  poet  of  Nature  than  as  a 
poet  of  human  emotion,  an  historian  of 
souls.  He  speaks  with  a  higher  elo- 
quence, a  greater  power,  when  he  is  tell- 
ing us  of  the  ecstasy  of  Isolde  or  the  de- 
spair of  Amfortas,  than  when  he  is  pictur- 
33 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ing  for  us  the  depths  of  Siegfried's  forest 
or  the  majestic  flow  of  the  Rhine.  He  is 
not  pre-eminently  a  master  of  musical 
landscape,  fine  and  memorable  as  are  his 
excursions  in  that  field. 

The  supreme  achievements  of  mu- 
sical landscape-painting  are  of  to-day. 
We  shall  find  them  in  the  music  of 
four  composers  of  our  own  time,  whose 
names  I  have  already  mentioned,  who,  by 
reason  of  the  power  and  eloquence  of 
their  delineation  of  the  natural  world, 
are  without  peers  in  their  field.  They 
are  the  Frenchmen  Claude  Debussy  and 
Vincent  d'Indy,  and  the  Americans 
Charles  Martin  Loefiler  and  Edward 
MacDowell.  We  shall  see  these  men  not 
only  producing  Nature-music  of  incom- 
parable excellence,  but  approaching  their 
subject-matter  from  new  and  unprece- 
dented standpoints. 

Wagner,  no  less  than  his  predecessors 
among  the  musical  Nature-painters, 
viewed  the  outer  world  quite  simply; 
34 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

either  as  a  congeries  of  impressive  or 
lovely  subjects  to  be  transcribed  upon  the 
orchestral  canvas,  or  as  the  cause  of  cer- 
tain responsive  moods  in  himself.  With 
him,  as  with  all  of  his  forerunners  in  this 
field,  it  was  either  sheer  delineation  of  ex- 
ternal aspects  that  was  attempted,  or — as 
Beethoven  said  of  his  "Pastoral"  sym- 
phony— an  "expression  of  feeling,"  of 
moods  provoked  by  the  contemplation  of 
Nature  under  various  conditions.  Wag- 
ner was  able  to  surpass  his  predecessors  in 
this  kind  of  writing  by  reason  of  his  su- 
perlative genius  as  a  master  of  musical 
imagery,  and  also  because  of  the  greater 
richness,  variety,  and  plasticity  of  the 
medium  which  he  was  able  to  employ — a 
medium  the  enormously  increased  ef- 
ficiency of  which  he  himself  had  done 
much  to  bring  about. 

When  we  come  to  the  tonal  landscap- 
ists  who  were  contemporary  with  Wag- 
ner,   or    who    came     after    him — such 
representative  men   as    (to   name  but  a 
35 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

few)  Raff,  Smetana,  Rimsky- Korsakoff, 
Dvorak,  Grieg — we  find  that  for  the  most 
part  they  approached  Nature  in  the  same 
spirit  as  their  predecessors:  either  as  a 
subject  to  be  faithfully  rendered,  or  as 
the  provocator  of  direct  emotional  re- 
actions in  themselves.  But  in  the  land- 
scape-music of  those  chief  contemporary 
Nature-painters  whom  I  have  named — 
Debussy,  d'Indy,  Loeffler,  and  Mac- 
Dowell — we  find  different  conditions 
and  other  aims.  Aside  from  effects 
secured  through  the  far  subtler  expres- 
sional  means  which  the  cumulative  en- 
richment of  musical  material  has  en- 
abled them  to  utilise,  we  shall  find  that 
they  disclose  an  attitude  toward  their  sub- 
ject-matter— toward  the  natural  world  as 
a  theme — which  we  have  not  previously 
encountered  among  the  musical  landscap- 
ists,  though  one  which  is  familiar  enough 
in  poetic  art.  For  these  men  the  world 
of  external  nature  is  no  longer  merely  a 
group  of  phenomena,  lovely  or  terrible, 

36 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

whose  picturesque  aspects,  or  the  moods 
which  they  awaken,  are  to  be  sympathet- 
ically recorded.  It  is  become  rather  a 
kind  of  magic  mirror,  throwing  back  an 
infinitude  of  images,  entrancing  or  gro- 
tesque, serene  or  tragic,  horrible  or  sub- 
lime— a  reflector  of  the  temperaments 
and  prepossessions  with  which  it  is  con- 
fronted. Or — to  alter  the  figure — it  is 
a  miraculous  harp,  an  instrument  of  un- 
limited range  and  inexhaustible  respon- 
siveness, upon  which  the  performer  may 
improvise  at  his  pleasure.  It  is  Nature 
made  sympathetic  and  psychical.  Nature 
suffused  with  subjective  emotion.  In 
short,  we  are  witnessing  the  outcome  of 
that  relationship  between  the  susceptible 
imagination  and  an  infinitely  adaptive 
and  compliant  Nature  which,  in  litera- 
ture, resulted  in  such  various  poetry  as 
that  of  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  Coleridge, 
Whitman,  Poe,  Baudelaire,  Verlaine. 
We  are  no  longer  in  the  presence  of  that 
natural  world  which  for  Couperin, 
37 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Haydn,  Beethoven,  and  Mendelssohn,  as 
for  Homer  and  Theocritus,  Catullus  and 
Virgil,  was  in  the  main  an  unalterably 
objective  fact — an  environing  panorama, 
rather  than  an  enchanted  lake  in  which 
each  observer  saw  mirrored  only  the 
image  of  his  own  soul.  We  have  found 
a  condition  which,  though  present  in  lit- 
erature for  a  century,  has  had  no  exist- 
ence in  the  far  less  mature  art  of  music 
before  our  own  day. 

In  the  music  of  those  men  whom  I 
have  named  there  are,  of  course,  the  wid- 
est differences  in  individual  manner  of 
approach — differences  so  marked  as  that, 
for  example,  which  lies  between  a  habit 
of  seeing  in  the  outer  world  a  majes- 
tic apparition  of  the  Divine,  and  the  pre- 
possession which  finds  in  it  only  dark 
presences  and  unspeakable  omens;  but  in 
the  art  of  each  we  shall  find  disclosed  an 
attitude  which  is  typical,  so  far  as  music 
is  concerned,  of  our  own  time. 

Claude  Debussy  is  best  known  to  the 
38 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

world  as  the  composer  of  "Pelleas  et 
Melisande,"  a  setting  of  Maeterlinck's 
drama  in  which  the  musician  has  swept 
all  the  emotional  strings  and  searched  the 
chambers  of  the  heart.  But  Debussy  is 
more  than  a  subtle  psychologist,  a  writer 
of  poignant  spiritual  histories;  he  is  also 
a  landscape-painter  of  an  uncommon  or- 
der. A  mercurial  being,  a  protean  tem- 
perament, he  is  by  turns  dramatist,  lyrist, 
rhapsodist,  dreamer;  Greek,  Oriental;  a 
master  of  line,  yet  a  delicious  colorist;  a 
classicist,  yet  an  incorrigible  romantic. 
Yet  Debussy  is  before  all  else  a  visionary 
and  mystic,  a  dweller  in  the  spiritual 
borderlands.  "Our  normal,  waking,  ra- 
tional consciousness,"  wrote  William 
James  in  one  of  his  striking  generalisa- 
tions, "is  but  one  special  type  of  con- 
sciousness, whilst  all  about  it,  parted 
from  it  by  the  filmiest  screens,  there  lie 
potential  forms  of  consciousness  entirely 
different."  Debussy,  having  the  piercing 
sight  of  the  mystic,  finds  no  impediment 
39 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

in  these  "filmy  screens."  His  usual  emo- 
tional life  is  passed  on  the  farther  side  of 
the  boundaries  of  that  field  of  conscious- 
ness which  most  men  would  call  "nor- 
mal," and  he  is  forever  bringing  back 
across  the  border  rumours  of  the  aspects 
and  occupations  of  an  unexplored  coun- 
try: tales  of  fabulous  and  visionary  land- 
scapes; of  desires  and  dreams  that  come 
to  fulfilment  in  some 

"...  shadowy  isle  of  bliss 
Midmost  the  beating  of  the  steely  sea," 

where  he,  too,  like  St.  Martin,  has  seen 
"flowers  that  sounded"  and  heard  "notes 
that  shone" :  where,  as  in  the  traditions 
known  to  the  old  Celtic  poets,  "the  noise 
of  the  sunfire  on  the  waves  at  daybreak  is 
audible  for  those  who  have  ears  to  hear." 
That  is  the  world  which  is  native  to  him. 
His  music  gleams  more  often  with  "the 
light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land"  than 
with  the  light  of  common  day;  when  it  is 
40 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

most  typical,  it  seems  like  a  precipitation 
from  an  authentic  world  of  dreams. 

Debussy's  nearest  kin  among  landscap- 
ists  of  the  brush — with  whom  he  suggests 
analogies  more  frequently  than  with  the 
landscapists  of  literature — are  such  dif- 
fering spirits  as  Bocklin,  Corot,  and 
Whistler.  He  combines  the  rich  and  fan- 
tastic imagination  of  the  Swiss  and  the 
limpid  surfaces  of  the  Frenchman  with 
the  American's  mastery  of  nuance.  But 
in  Debussy  these  traits  are  etherealised, 
alembicated — translated  into  the  terms 
of  that  remoter  and  more  aerial  re- 
gion where  this  singular  tone-poet 
has  his  essential  being.  In  music 
there  are  no  analogies  to  be  found  for 
him,  save  among  his  imitators.  There 
is  in  his  tonal  landscapes  no  hint  of 
the  elemental  Nature  of  Haydn,  Beet- 
hoven, Wagner,  Mendelssohn,  Dvorak. 
His  Nature-painting  has  no  smack  of  the 
soil,  of  the  solid  earth,  nothing  of  the 
clear  outlines,  definite  forms,  and  famil- 
41 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

iar  images  which  we  find  in  the  musical 
scene-painting  of  the  older  landscapists. 
For  him,  as  for  Shelley,  "Nature  is  not 
a  picture  set  for  his  copying,  but  a  palette 
set  for  his  brush";  and  the  colours  with 
which  his  brush  is  loaded  are  such  as  no 
painter  in  tones  had  ever  before  em- 
ployed. 

Debussy  delights  not  only  in  translat- 
ing into  subtle  images  of  tone  such  fa- 
miliar phases  of  the  picturesque  as  reflec- 
tions in  quiet  waters  and  the  descending 
slant  of  moonbeams,  but  such  less  accus- 
tomed themes  as  the  stillness  of  breath- 
less summer  noons,  the  slow  procession 
of  the  clouds,  the  mystery  of  a  ruined 
temple  under  the  moon,  the  vague  melan- 
choly that  burdens  the  distant  sound  of 
bells  heard  through  Autumn  woods;  or, 
as  in  his  setting  of  Mallarme's  "Afternoon 
of  a  Faun,"  he  conjures  before  our  enam- 
oured eyes  a  tonal  vision  the  beauty  of 
which  seems  to  have  been  miraculously 
recovered  from  the  golden  ages  of  the 
42 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

world:  a  rhapsodic  evocation,  of  flawless 
and  ravishing  loveliness,  for  which  there 
is  no  companion-piece  in  music.    Nothing 
in  the  least  like  this  transfigured  erotic 
reverie,  this  exquisite  blend  of  Nature- 
painting    and    subtly   sensuous    lyricism, 
had  ever  before  been  attempted.     No  one 
but  Debussy  could  have  conceived  and 
accomplished    it.     But    from    whatever 
angle  he  chooses   to   transcribe   the  ex- 
ternal world,  it  is  seldom  disclosed  to  his 
vision  save  as  some  enchanted  and  won- 
der-breeding apparition.     He  sees  it  al- 
ways as  through  a  necromantic  golden 
mist,  which  imbues  with  fantastic  light 
its  woods  and  streams  and  cloudy  tur- 
rets, peoples  its  glades  and  meadows  with 
strange  beings  and  anonymous  presences, 
and  transmits  to  his   ears  alluring  and 
mysterious  voices. 

He  is  occasionally,  it  is  true,  tangible 

and   familiar,    as,    for   example,    in    his 

"Rondes  de  Printemps,"  No.  Ill  of  the 

"Images"  for  orchestra;  but  this  is  one  of 

43 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

a  very  few  exceptional  cases.   Let  us,  for 
that  reason,  consider  it  a  moment. 
The  piece  bears  this  motto: 

"Vive  le  Mai,  bienvenu  soit  le  Mai 
Avec  son  gonfalon  sauvage." 

But  SO  far  as  the  manifest  mood  of  the 
music  is  concerned  Debussy  might  have 
had  in  mind  the  last  four  of  those  won- 
derful lines  from  Shelley's  Ode  to  the 
West  Wind— 

" .  .  .  O  thou, 
Who  chariotest  to  their  dark  wintry  bed 
The  winged  seeds,  where  they  lie  cold  and  low, 
Each  like  a  corpse  within  its  grave,  until 
Thine  azure  sister  of   the  spring  shall   blow 
Her  clarion  o'er  the  dreaming  earth,  and  fill 
(Driving  sweet  buds  like  flocks  to  feed  in  air) 
With  living  hues  and  odours  plain  and  hill." 

Let  me  confess  at  once  that  I  am  aware 
of  no    more    enchanting    celebration    of 
Spring  in  all  music  than  this  thrice-lov- 
able score.     Debussy   has  captured  the 
44 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

essential  spirit  of  the  Spring,  and  he 
has  released  it  in  music  the  vitality, 
the  gayety,  the  tenderness,  the  freshness, 
and  the  magical  charm  of  which  are  be- 
yond denotement  These  songs  of  Spring 
are  songs  of  jubilation.  There  is  in  them 
nothing  of  the  vague  but  poignant  sad- 
ness of  Spring  days — a  sadness  that  can 
be  more  intolerable  than  any  sadness  that 
pertains  to  the  moods  of  Autumn.  This 
music  is  tremulous  with  the  sense  of 
quickening  and  stirring  life;  it  is  possible 
to  hear  in  it  the  merriment  of  dancing  and 
singing  children,  or  we  are  reminded  of 
flower-decked  creatures  sporting  in  dim 
forest  glades;  but  its  prevailing  note  is 
impersonal,  elemental.  It  exhales  the 
vernal  rapture  of  the  natural  world, 
rather  than  the  Springtime  passion  that 
can  fill  the  human  heart  with  a  swelling 
tide  of  mysterious  joy  and  unutterable 
longing.  Debussy,  when  he  wrote  this 
delectable  and  adorable  music,  sent  his 
spirit  into  the  woods  and  fields,  through 
45 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

gardens  and  orchards  and  petal-showered 
lanes,  and  out  upon  the  moors  and  hills; 
he  trod  the  brown  soil  of  the  earth,  but 
he  also  looked  long  up  into  the  green 
branches  and  the  warm  gusty  sky  of  May, 
and  savoured  the  fragrant  winds. 

Because  this  music  has  been  grossly  un- 
dervalued, and  occupies  a  very  incon- 
spicuous place  among  Debussy's  larger 
works,  it  is  worth  insisting  that  the  score 
is  a  masterpiece.  It  has  remarkable 
beauties,  and  it  is  packed  with  felicitous 
and  eloquent  detail,  melodic,  harmonic, 
instrumental.  At  the  first  hearing  there 
are  passages  that  for  some  will  perplex 
the  ear,  others  that  will  seem  to  be  pur- 
poseless or  merely  wayward;  but  an  in- 
creased acquaintance  with  the  score 
elucidates  it  completely.  It  can  no 
more  be  apprehended  at  an  initial 
hearing  than  can  any  other  modern 
work  of  novel  substance  and  intricate 
and  subtle  texture.  But  it  abundantly 
rewards  continued  observation.  How 
46 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

lovely,  and  how  saturated  with  the  inef- 
fable charm  of  Debussy  at  his  best,  are 
the  soft  staccato  chords  of  the  clarinets 
and  flutes  near  the  opening;  or  the  gay 
dance  melody  that  bursts  exuberantly 
from  the  strings  soon  after;  or  the  pas- 
sage in  which  the  horn  sustains  a  delicate 
thread  of  sound  above  a  meditative 
phrase  of  the  'cellos;  or  the  indescribable 
passage  for  divided  strings,  pianissimo; 
or  that  inarticulate  whispering  and  stir- 
ring of  the  whole  orchestra  which  is  as 
the  secret  processes  of  the  forest  made 
audible;  or  that  passage  of  entrancing 
sweetness  wherein  the  violins,  high  above 
a  soft  and  rich  complexity  of  supporting 
tone,  carry  a  tenderly  contemplative  mel- 
ody to  a  pause  of  quiet  and  mysterious 
beauty;  and  with  what  unerring,  re- 
sourceful, and  perfect  art  the  music  is 
put  upon  the  orchestral 

It  might  truly  be  said  of  Debussy  that 
in  this  delectable  score,  Nature,  in  the 
47 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

words  of  Shelley,  has  indeed  made  him 
her  lyre. 

It  will  be  recalled  that  the  convenient 
and  sufficiently  plausible  theory  of  M. 
Pierre  Janet  which  was  mentioned  at  the 
beginning  of  these  casual  and  desultory 
notes  was,  in  effect,  that  the  typical 
lover  and  celebrant  of  the  natural  world 
is  characterised  by  impatience  of  ham- 
pering traditions,  by  a  temperament 
and  a  habit  of  mind  essentially  anti- 
conventional.  Debussy,  one  of  the 
most  consummate  Nature-poets  in  mu- 
sic, might  well  have  suggested  this 
definition.  Those  who  have  reflected 
sympathetically  upon  the  character  of  his 
work  need  scarcely  be  told  that  in  his  use 
of  suggestive  musical  symbols  he  fol- 
lows a  manner  of  procedure  for  which 
there  is  no  exact  precedent.  He  is  in  this 
matter,  as  in  all  others,  a  law  unto  him- 
self. His  Nature-music  is  incompar- 
able not  so  much  because,  as  Mr.  Howells 
has  said  of  the  fiction  of  Henry  James, 
48 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

there  is  nothing  to  equal  it,  "but  because 
there  is  nothing  at  all  like  it."  In  his 
depiction  of  the  scenes,  moods,  processes 
of  Nature,  Debussy  is  hardly  ever  con- 
cerned with  achieving  a  graphic  and 
eloquent  representation  of  the  external 
world.  He  has  an  indubitably  keen  sense 
of  it,  but,  even  in  so  frank  and  direct  a 
transcription  as  the  "Rondes  de  Prin- 
temps,"  he  is  much  less  interested  in  giv- 
ing us  an  account  of  its  outward  aspects 
than  in  recording  his  perception  of  what 
one  may  call  the  emotional  overtones  of 
the  particular  spectacle  that  it  discloses 
to  his  mind.  A  poet  of  unexampled 
poetic  sensitiveness,  he  is  continually 
aware  of  surfaces  and  contours  which  are 
not  disclosed  to  his  less  rarely  gifted  fel- 
lows. He  hears  with  the  spiritual  ear 
a  strange  and  haunting  music  in  the  wind, 
a  mysterious  lilt  in  "the  undersong  of 
the  tides,"  and  he  knows  the  streams  and 
woods  of  an  Arcady  that  is  as  yet  un- 
sung by  the  poets.  Upon  the  title-page 
49 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

of  every  one  of  his  essays  in  tonal  land- 
scape-painting (as,  indeed,  upon  all  his 
music)  should  be  inscribed  the  cautionary 
words  of  Poe, 

"Ah,  bear  in  mind  this  garden  is  enchanted." 

There  is  some  music  which  should  be  de- 
scribed by  poets  rather  than  exposed  by 
inquisitive  aestheticians.  Of  such  is  this 
magical  music  of  Debussy's. 

In  his  attitude  toward  the  things  of 
the  external  world,  this  master  of  moods 
and  visions  stands  always,  as  Francis 
Thompson  has  said  (not  altogether 
aptly)  of  Shelley,  "at  the  very  junction 
lines  of  the  visible  and  invisible,  and 
can  shift  the  points  as  he  wills."  But 
it  is  from  the  remoter  position  that  he  ad- 
dresses us  most  often  and  most  engaging- 
ly: from  that  many-coloured  land  of  the 
imagination  which  is  known  to  those, 
even  the  least  gifted,  for  whom  the  Gates 
of  Wonder  have  been  opened. 

With  Debussy's  countryman,  Vincent 
50 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

d'Indy,  like  himself,  a  musical  recusant, 
we  come  upon  a  tonal  landscapist  of  dif- 
ferent calibre.  He,  too,  is  a  mystic;  but 
whereas  for  Debussy  the  beauty  and  won- 
der of  the  visible  earth  are  merely  so 
many  stimuli  to  his  inflammable  and 
transmuting  imagination,  for  d'Indy  they 
are  august  revelations  of  the  Divine.  He 
is  deeply  devout;  like  Vaughan  and 
Wordsworth,  a  religious  mystic  of 
the  purest  type.  For  him  the  green 
earth  and  the  majestic  canopy  of 
heaven  are  only,  in  Wordsworth's 
phrase,  "the  garment  of  God" — an  ex- 
pression of  unseen  spiritual  realities.  The 
spectacle  of  external  Nature,  in  win- 
some, forbidding,  or  awful  guise,  calls 
forth  in  him  reverent  and  exalted  emo- 
tions. One  can  conceive  him  giving 
Blake's  answer  to  the  questioner  who 
asked:  "What!  when  the  sun  rises  do  you 
not  see  a  round  disc  of  fire,  something 
like  a  guinea?"  "No!  I  see  an  innumer- 
able company  of  the  heavenly  host,  cry- 
Si 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ing,  'Holy,  Holy,  Holy  is  the  Lord  God 
Almighty.'  " 

For  d'Indy  the  winds  and  the  waters 
are  eloquent  of  supernal  things.  The 
terrible  majesty  of  dawn,  the  evening 
light  on  mountain  summits,  the  peace 
that  falls  upon  the  valley,  all  discourse 
to  him  of  divine  and  immortal  things — 
all  are  to  him,  as  to  that  true  seer,  Jona- 
than Edwards,  "adumbrations  of  His 
glory  and  goodness,  of  His  mildness  and 
gentleness." 

It  is  doubtless  a  far  cry  from  the  aus- 
tere and  excellent  Puritan  to  the  expo- 
nent of  modern  musical  Paris;  yet  they 
view  the  natural  world  from  fundamen- 
tally the  same  standpoint — the  old  mys- 
tic, who  found  that  "God's  excellency, 
wisdom,  purity,  and  love  seemed  to  ap- 
pear in  everything :  in  the  clouds,  the  blue 
sky,  in  the  grass,  flowers,  trees,  in  the 
water,  and  all  nature,"  and  who  declared 
that  he  was  forever  "singing  forth,  with 
a  low  voice,"  his  "contemplations  of  the 
52 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Creator" ;  and  the  gifted  artist  of  our  own 
time,  whose  most  characteristic  achieve- 
ment, "A  Summer  Day  on  the  Moun- 
tain," is  in  essence  a  gravely  ecstatic 
hymn,  a  tonal  paean  in  praise  of  the  eter- 
nal miracle  of  created  Nature. 

His  approach  to  the  spectacle  of  its 
wonders  and  beauties  is  Wordsworthian 
in  its  deep  and  awe-struck  reverence  and 
its  unrelaxing  seriousness  and  sincerity. 
He  does  not,  like  his  younger  artistic 
kinsman,  Debussy,  see  in  it  all  manner  of 
fantastic  and  mist-enwrapped  visions;  it 
is  not  for  him  a  pageant  of  delicate  and 
shining  dreams — Mallarme's  lazy  and  in- 
dulgent Faun  in  amorous  woodland  rev- 
erie would  not  have  suggested  to  him,  as 
to  Debussy,  music  whose  sensuousness  is 
as  patent  as  it  is  marvellously  transfig- 
ured. The  mysticism  of  d'Indy  is  pre- 
eminently, as  I  have  said,  religious;  it 
has  no  tinge  of  sensuousness;  it  is  large 
and  austere  rather  than  intimate  and  im- 
passioned. 

53 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

D'Indy  has  written  other  Nature-music 
besides  the  "Jo^r  d'ete  a  la  Montagne." 
There  is  some  in  his  "Symphonie  sur  un 
Air  Montagnard  Frangais,"  and  it  is  the 
stuff  out  of  which  he  made  his  little- 
known  suite  for  piano,  the  "Poemes  des 
Montagnes,"  an  effective  and  poetic,  but 
not  very  characteristic  outgiving  of  his 
younger  days.  It  is  the  "Jour  d'ete  a  la 
Montagne"  which  distinguishes  him  as  a 
Nature-poet, — which  puts  him  in  the 
class  of  those  four  transcending  landscap- 
ists  in  tone  of  whose  peculiarities  as  cele- 
brants of  the  external  world  I  am  endeav- 
ouring to  give  some  idea.  It  is  because  of 
this  one  work  that  I  am  tempted  to  think 
at  times  that  he  is  the  noblest  Nature-poet 
of  them  all.  Indeed,  I  shall  be  so  bold  as 
to  say  that  by  virtue  of  this  score  he 
stands  with  that  great  poet  of  "the  Out- 
world"  whom  I  have  already  named — 
Wordsworth. 

The  "Jour  d'ete  a  la  Montagne"  is  a 
54 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

symphonic  poem  in  three  parts,  and  is 
representative  of  d'Indy's  mature  devel- 
opment as  a  composer — it  was  w^ritten  in 
1905.  The  score  is  prefaced  by  a  long 
and  rhapsodic  prose-poem  of  Roger  de 
Pampelonne's,  w^hich  serves  to  suggest  its 
inspirational  basis.  Both  poem  and  music 
are  thus  divided  and  entitled:  the  first 
part,  "Dawn" ;  the  second,  "Day  (After- 
noon Under  the  Pines) " ;  the  third,  "Eve- 
ning." I  shall  give  in  translation  a  few 
excerpts  from  each  section  as  an  index  to 
the  moods  of  the  piece: 

(Dawn):  "Awake,  dark  phantoms!  smile  to 
heaven,  majestically,  for  a  ray  in  the  Infinite  arises 
and  strikes  your  brow. 

"Awake,  mountains !    The  king  of  space  appears ! 

"Awake,  valley!  who  concealest  the  happy  nests 
and  sleeping  cottages;  awake  singing.  And  if,  in 
thy  chant,  sighs  also  reach  me,  may  the  light  wind 
of  the  morning  hours  gather  them  and  bear  them  to 
God  .  .  .  The  shadows  melt  away  little  by  little, 
before  the  invading  light  .  .  .  Laugh  or  weep, 
creatures  who  people  this  world.  Awake,  har- 
monies!   God  hearkens!  .  .  ." 

5S. 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

(Day — Afternoon  under  the  Pines)  :  "How 
sweet  it  is  to  cling  to  the  mountain-sides,  broad 
staircase  of  heaven!  How  sweet  it  is  to  dream,  far 
from  the  turmoil  of  man,  in  the  smiling  majesty  of 
the  mountain-tops !  Here,  all  earthly  sounds  mount 
in  harmony  towards  my  rested  heart;  here,  all  be- 
comes hymn  and  prayer  .  .  ." 

(Evening)  :  "Night  steals  across  the  all-covering 
sky,  and  the  waning  light  sends  forth  a  fresh  breath 
swiftly  over  the  weary  world.  Soon  all  things  sleep 
beneath  the  shadows,  all  appears  ghostly  in  the  val- 
ley; yet  all  still  lives  .  .  .  O  Night!  Eternal  Har- 
mony dwells  beneath  thy  veil ;  joy  and  grief  are  but 
sleeping.  O  Night!  consuming  Life  stirs  through 
the  all-consuming  Day;  Life  creates  itself  anew  be- 
neath the  pearl-strewn  mantle  of  thy  outstretched 
arms  .  .  ." 

D'Indy,  who  has  lived  much  of  the 
time  in  the  mountain  regions  of  his  own 
France,  is  also,  spiritually,  a  dweller  on 
the  heights.  In  all  music  (and  I  speak 
with  anxious  sobriety)  I  am  aware  of  no 
composer  whose  thought  is  more  consist- 
ently noble,  more  consistently  elevated, 
than  his.  Something  of  the  largeness,  the 
upliftedness,  the  austerity,  the  strength 

56 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

and  sternness  of  his  beloved  mountains 
has  decended  upon  his  spirit;  so  that  I 
cannot  conceive  him  writing  music  that 
is  ignoble  or  trivial  or  meretricious.  The 
^'Summer  Day  on  the  Mountain"  is  not 
only  his  masterpiece,  it  is  the  man  him- 
self— a  precipitation  of  his  own  soul.  If 
none  of  his  scores  remained  to  us  but  this, 
we  should  still  be  able  to  reconstruct  from 
it  a  spiritual  image  of  the  essential  d'lndy. 
I  have  compared  him  with  Wordsworth 
— and  he  is,  in  a  remarkable  degree,  a 
musical  counterpart  of  Wordsworth  the 
Nature-poet.  But  he  is  a  Wordsworth 
of  heightened  emotional  sensibility  and 
more  rigid  aesthetic  scruples.  The  "Jour 
d'ete"  is  worthy  of  Wordsworth  at  his 
best.  It  has  an  equal  aspiration,  an  equal 
reverence,  an  equal  raptness  and  nobility, 
and  it  has,  besides,  an  intensity  of  ex- 
pression, a  distinction  of  style,  which 
Wordsworth  came  upon  only  in  rare  mo- 
ments. In  this  serene  and  lovely  work, 
the  mountains  have,  for  the  first  time  in 
57 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

music,  been  adequately  celebrated.  No 
one  who  loves  the  hills,  and  who  is  cap- 
able of  reacting  to  such  music  as  d'Indy's, 
can  hear  this  superb  hymn  without  an 
emotion  which  will  cause  him,  at  least  for 
a  while,  to  look  out  upon  the  world  with 
an  uplifted  heart. 

Like  much  that  is  fine  and  rare  in  the 
music  of  our  time,  this  score  is  years 
ahead  of  its  contemporaneous  public. 
But  when  its  day  shall  come,  I  think  that 
there  will  be  many  who  cannot  fail  to 
listen  to  it  not  only  with  delight  in  the 
majestic  and  tender  poetry  of  its  musical 
speech,  but  because  it  will  transport  them, 
for  a  moment,  to  the  heights. 

Charles  Martin  Loeffler,  an  American 
of  Alsatian  birth,  Franco-German  train- 
ing, and  French  affiliations  (whose  gen- 
eral characteristics  as  a  musician  I  dis- 
cuss at  length  elsewhere  in  this  volume), 
is,  like  Debussy  and  d'Indy,  a  landscap- 
ist  of  mystical  temper,  though  he  lacks 
the  blitheness  of  the  one  and  the  austerity 
58 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

of  the  other.  He  is  primarily  a  tra- 
gedian, with  much  of  Thomas  Hardy's 
feeling  for  the  ominous  and  terrible  in 
Nature — indeed,  he  might  not  unreason- 
ably be  regarded  as  a  living  commentary 
upon  that  passage  of  Hardy's  concerning 
Egdon  Heath  wherein  the  novelist  speaks 
of  those  human  souls  who  may  come  to 
find  themselves  "in  closer  and  closer  har- 
mony with  external  things  wearing  a 
sombreness  distasteful  to  our  race  when 
it  was  young."  Loeffler  betrays  this  in- 
stinctive sympathy  with  the  tragical  in 
Nature.  His  spiritual  brethren  are  Poe, 
Baudelaire,  Maeterlinck,  Verlaine,  in 
their  darker  and  disconsolate  hours.  In 
the  mood  which  is  most  frequent  with 
him,  he  is  native  to  a  world  oppressed 
by  nameless  and  immemorial  griefs, 
dolorous  with  the  shadow  of  death,  where 
the  winds  are  heavy  with  bodement  and 
vague  menace.  Images  of  the  King  of 
Terrors  haunt  his  imagination ;  a  vast  and 
bitter  melancholy  encompasses  him. 
59 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Thus  he  is  drawn  to  contrive  tonal 
analogues  for  such  a  desolate  and  sinis- 
ter landscape  as  he  has  found  in  Maurice 
Rollinat's  dire  poem,  ''The  Pool,"  with 
its  mordant  picturing  of  dank  and  lonely 
marshes,  lowering  twilight  skies,  com- 
plaining frogs,  and  the  vacuous,  spectral 
face  of  the  moon.  He  has  sought  musical 
expression  also  for  Rollinat's  other  and 
yet  more  woful  picture  of  the  ghostly 
bagpipe-player  whose  groaning  tune  is 
heard  by  night,  under  a  bleak  sky,  "near 
the  cross-roads  of  the  crucifix";  and 
among  his  smaller  pieces  there  is  none 
more  characteristic  than  his  superb  set- 
ting of  Verlaine's  unutterably  mournful 
fantasy  of  sobbing  horn  notes  borne  at 
sunset  upon  Winter  winds — "Le  Son  du 
Cor  s'afflige  vers  les  Bois." 

He  can  paint,  it  is  true,  in  other  colors. 
His  orchestral  transcription  of  the 
exquisite  aubade  which  Verlaine,  in 
"La  Bonne  Chanson,"  addressed  to 
his  bride,  is  music  of  such  enchant- 
60 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ing  freshness,  sweetness,  and  lyric  rap- 
ture that  it  recalls  the  saying  of  Whit- 
man: "What  subtle  tie  is  this  between 
one's  soul  and  the  break  of  day?"  But 
in  his  nature-painting  we  find  for  the 
most  part  canvases  of  sable  hue:  land- 
scapes upon  which  the  sun  has  forever  set, 
situate  in  some  "dim  empire  of  sorrow," 
where — as  in  the  grievous  fantasy  of  wail- 
ing horn  tones  which  he  has  paraphrased 
— "all  the  air  is  like  an  autumn  sigh." 

We  encounter  a  temperament  of  a  dif- 
ferent order  in  the  American,  Edward 
MacDowell.  MacDowell  was  a  land- 
scapist  who  would  have  compelled  the 
delighted  attention  of  Matthew  Arnold, 
had  that  sensitive  gauger  of  poetic  values 
been  as  responsive  to  musical  as  to  literary 
influences.  MacDowell  was,  strangely 
enough,  the  only  Celt  who  has  ever  writ- 
ten music  of  first-rate  quality;  and  he 
was  also  the  only  valid  exponent  of  Cel- 
tic feeling  and  Celtic  perception  that  is 
to  be  found  in  the  whole  range  of  what 
6i 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

we  call  "artistic"  music,  as  distinguished 
from  folk-music.  Though  an  American 
by  birth,  he  was  a  Celt  by  virtue  of  an- 
cestry and  innate  affiliation,  and  he  en- 
joyed that  deep  and  abiding  intimacy 
with  natural  things  which  is  the  incon- 
testable heritage  of  the  Celt.  He  was 
tenderly  and  acutely  aware  of  every 
phase  and  alteration  of  the  earth,  sea,  and 
sky.  To  him,  as  to  Richard  Feverel, 
the  fields  and  the  waters  "shouted  to  him 
golden  shouts."  He  had  Keats's  delight 
in  the  sheer  actuality  and  presence  of 
the  natural  world.  He  was  halted  by 
the  echo  of  the  wind  along  the  shore,  the 
aromatic  breath  of  the  woods,  the  smell 
of  the  warm  turf,  the  colour  and  bloom 
and  opulence  of  Nature  in  her  immediate 
and  elemental  appeal.  To  such  varied 
persuasions  as  these  he  responded  with 
exceptional  quickness  and  intensity,  and 
he  knew  how  to  capture  and  convey  the 
sense  of  them  in  music  which,  regarded 
as  sheer  Nature-painting,  stands  alone  in 
62 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  intimacy  and  vividness  of  its  render- 
ing. 

But  there  was  another  and  more  not- 
able side  to  his  relations  with  the  outer 
world.  He  had  the  Celt's  peculiar  and 
instinctive  sensibility  toward  the  appeal 
of  that  which  is  remote,  solitary,  of 
strange  beauty  and  import — the  imagina- 
tive leaning  toward  "old,  forgotten,  far- 
ofif  things,"  and  the  wistful  sadness  in  the 
contemplation  of  them,  which  sets  the 
Celt,  as  an  artist,  definitely  apart.  Above 
all,  he  had  that  distinctively  Celtic  way 
of  transcribing  Nature  which  Arnold 
has  called  "magical."  Those  are  the 
chief,  the  distinguishing,  possessions  of 
his  Nature-music  when  it  is  most  typical ; 
the  feeling  of  the  remote  and  irreclaim- 
able which  underlies  and  pervades  it;  and 
the  magical  power  with  which  that  feel- 
ing is  expressed  and  communicated.  He 
can  achieve,  as  I  have  said,  vivid  similes 
of  near  and  familiar  things:  the  flavour 
of  woods,  fields,  gardens,  the  brooding 
63 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

mystery  of  deep  woods,  the  wide,  tonic 
spaces  of  moor  and  sky.  But  what  is 
unique  and  unparalleled  in  his  music  is 
its  quality  of  Celtic  magic,  which  touches 
and  transfigures  even  his  frankest  render- 
ing of  the  sunlit  scenery  of  the  accus- 
tomed world;  though  it  is  never  so  seiz- 
ing as  when  it  carries  the  rumour  of  some 
wild  Ossianic  night,  "when  the  Gael- 
strains  chant  themselves  from  the  mists" ; 
or  when — and  perhaps,  then,  most  poign- 
antly— its  burden  is  "the  ancient  sorrow 
of  the  hills." 

There  is  another  aspect  of  tonal  Na- 
ture-painting which  it  is  worth  while  to 
consider.  It  is  that  which  might  be  suf- 
ficiently indicated  in  a  distinction  be- 
tween musical  landscape-painting  and 
musical  geography;  and  I  shall  revert, 
for  convenience,  to  the  music  of  Claude 
Debussy  to  point  this  distinction — in  par- 
ticular, I  shall  allege  his  orchestral  suite, 
"Iberia"  (the  second  section  of  the  set  of 
64 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"Images"   of  which   "Rondes   de   Prin- 
temps"  is  the  third). 

Debussy,  in  these  impressions  of  what 
Mr.  James  would  call  "the  Spanish 
scene"  (the  suite  is  in  three  parts:  (i) 
"Par  les  rues  et  par  les  chemins";  (2) 
"Les  parfums  de  la  nuit";  (3)  "Le  matin 
d'un  jour  de  fete") ,  turned,  for  a  moment, 
from  the  field  of  musical  landscape  to  the 
field  of  musical  geography — an  unfortu- 
nate departure.  It  is  comparatively  easy 
to  set  geography  to  music — to  evoke,  by 
means  of  characteristic  rhythms,  melo- 
dies, and  instrumental  colours,  defi- 
nite impressions  of  particular  coun- 
tries, regions,  and  peoples.  The  thing 
has,  of  course,  been  done  again  and 
again  in  music;  for  Spain  it  has 
been  done  with  especial  effectiveness 
by  Bizet,  Chabrier,  Ravel,  to  name  but  a 
few.  But  how  often  has  it  yielded  music 
that  has  any  higher  quality  than  pictur- 
esqueness?  It  is  not  easy  to  think  of  a 
single  example  of  music  geographically 
65 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

inspired  that  bears  the  stamp  of  the  high- 
est musical  eloquence.  The  immediate 
and  stimulating  need  of  being  "pictur- 
esque" and  nationally  or  racially  vera- 
cious supersedes  the  familiar  and  less  ex- 
citing need  of  persuading  the  heart  by 
eloquent  speech.  I  do  not  know  of 
any  music  whose  motive  springs  from 
the  desire  for  geographical  celebration 
rather  than  from  the  contemplation  of 
abstract  Nature  which  is  more  than  skin- 
deep  in  its  emotional  quality  and  more 
than  external  in  its  charm.  Such  music 
at  its  best  is  fascinating,  engrossing,  de- 
lightful ;  but  does  it  ever  possess  the 
imagination  and  conquer  the  emotions  as 
does  sheer  musical  landscape-painting? 
Set  the  brilliant  and  undeniably  capti- 
vating '^Spanish  Rhapsody"  of  Chabrier 
beside  d'Indy's  "Summer  Day  on  the 
Mountain";  set  Charpentier's  "Impres- 
sions of  Italy"  beside  Loeffler's  "The 
Pool";  set  Debussy's  "Iberia"  beside  his 
"Rondes  de  Printemps":  which  makes 
66 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  profounder  address  to  the  imagina- 
tion: the  vivid  and  faithful  representa- 
tion of  geographic  traits — the  communi- 
cation of  a  particular  atmosphere  and  en- 
vironment; or  the  suggestion  of  a  mood 
or  aspect  of  Nature  which  has  no  specific 
relation  to  the  map?  D'Indy's  mountain 
under  various  Summer  aspects  might  be 
in  the  Tyrol  or  in  New  Hampshire; 
Loeffler's  pool  might  be  in  Normandy 
or  in  Massachusetts;  the  Springtime 
landscape  of  which  Debussy  sings  might 
be  in  England,  or  in  Brittany,  or  in  Bo- 
hemia, or  it  might  be  visible  from  the 
window  of  the  dweller  in  a  New  Jersey 
suburb.  To  write  music  that  aims  to  be 
specifically  and  definitely  local  is  neces- 
sarily to  commit  oneself  to  the  employ- 
ment of  rhythms,  melodic  forms,  orches- 
tral colors,  that  may  or  may  not  be  con- 
genial to  one's  own  habit  of  artistic 
speech;  their  employment  is  almost  in- 
evitably a  tour  de  force,  rather  than  a 
spontaneous  utterance  of  personal  vision 

67 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

and  emotion.  To  write  with  the  delib- 
erate intention  of  suggesting  a  particular 
section  of  the  map  is  to  bind  oneself  to 
more  or  less  rigid  formulas.  If  you 
would  impart  a  sense  of  Spain  you  are 
bound  to  employ  certain  dance  rhythms, 
certain  instrumenal  timbres,  which  are 
as  inevitable  in  any  tonal  representation 
of  Spain  as  are  the  tourist  cap,  the  mon- 
ocle, and  the  gaiters  in  the  costume  of 
the  stage  Englishman  of  ancient  farce. 
They  are  expected  and  inescapable;  and 
as  not  every  composer  who  elects  to  tell 
us  of  Spain  is  suited  by  natural  affinity 
to  employ  happily  the  musical  idioms 
that  are  associated  with  it,  there  is  noth- 
ing surprising  in  the  fact  that  he  should 
produce  music  which  interests  and  enter- 
tains us  as  an  exercise,  relatively  success- 
ful or  futile,  rather  than  persuades  us 
as  an  expression  of  some  profound  and 
individual  conviction  of  the  loveliness  or 
the  majesty  or  the  pathos  of  the  natural 
world — the  natural  world  that  is  outside 
68 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  influence  of  manners  and  customs  and 
boundary-lines.  Nor  does  it  follow  that 
when  the  composer  is  native  to  the  coun- 
try which  he  chooses  to  portray,  music 
of  first-class  quality  will  result;  the  more 
he  limits  the  sources  of  his  inspiration, 
the  more  he  limits  its  power,  its  depth, 
and  its  range  of  appeal. 

^'Iberia"  is,  indisputably,  an  amazing 
tour  de  force.  Debussy  had  never  before 
been  so  venturesome  in  harmony,  so  re- 
sourceful in  rhythm,  so  original  and  un- 
trammelled in  melodic  thought.  This 
last  statement  will  perhaps  be  incompre- 
hensible to  those  who  insist  that  Debussy 
is  not  only  "lacking  in  rhythm,"  but  that 
he  is  barren  of  melody.  The  truth  is,  of 
course,  as  every  sensitive  and  receptive 
student  of  Debussy  knows,  that  his  re- 
markable scores  are  singularly  fertile  in 
rhythmic  and  melodic  ideas — only  they 
are  very  different  ideas  from  those  to 
which  Schubert  and  Wagner  and  Chopin 
and  Brahms  have  accustomed  us:  so  dif- 

69 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ferent,  indeed,  so  new  and  strange,  that 
the  observer  of  conventional  taste  and 
standards  makes  the  time-honoured  mis- 
take of  denying  that  they  are  there  at  all. 
Debussy  does  not  write  the  kind  of 
rhythm  or  the  kind  of  melody,  any  more 
than  he  writes  the  kind  of  harmony, 
with  which  the  average  observer  is 
familiar  in  Chopin  and  Wagner,  Grieg 
and  Puccini;  ergo,  his  harmony  is  in- 
sane, his  melody  non-existent,  his  rhythm 
to  seek.  There  are  ideas  of  extraordinary 
originality  in  "Iberia."  But,  because,  as 
I  believe,  of  the  fetters  which  he  placed 
upon  his  inspiration  when  he  chose  his 
subject,  these  ideas  have  not  the  elo- 
quence that  Debussy,  when  his  thought 
is  unshackled,  knows  how  to  command. 
There  is  nothing  in  this  score,  as  I  have 
said,  that  is  worthy  to  be  set  beside  page 
after  page  of  "Rondes  de  Printemps." 
Yet  the  music  is  remarkable  in  many 
ways.  Its  rhythmic  variety  is  astonish- 
ing; the  melodic  thought  is  often  of  rare 
70 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

subtlety;  there  is  harmonic  invention  that 
never  flags,  that  never  says  the  otiose  or 
quotidian  thing;  and  the  orchestration 
is  ingenious,  dazzling,  masterly.  The 
first  movement,  "Par  les  Rues  et  Par  les 
Chemins,"  a  picture  full  of  colour  and 
animation,  is  the  longest  and  the  most 
elaborate,  occupying  fifty-three  of  the 
hundred  and  eight  pages  which  comprise 
the  score.  This  movement  is  the  most  en- 
ergetic piece  of  orchestral  writing  that  we 
have  had  from  Debussy;  and  it  is  also 
the  most  concrete  and  definite  in  imagina- 
tion. It  moves  close  to  the  ground;  it 
is  concerned  with  the  sights  and  sounds 
and  colours  of  familiar  life,  as  they  are 
to  be  observed  in  their  Spanish  setting. 
And  this  is  true  also  of  the  third  and 
much  shorter  movement,  "Le  matin  d'un 
Jour  de  Fete."  The  finer  Debussy — finer, 
because  he  is  here  concerned  with  Nature 
rather  than  geography — emerges  in  the 
middle  movement,  "Les  Parfums  de  la 
Nuit,"  a  night-picture  full  of  voluptuous 
71 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

and  romantic  beauty.  There  are  passages 
in  it  which  are  very  nearly  Debussy  at  his 
best — as  that  in  which  the  languorous 
song  of  the  oboe  is  heard  above  synco- 
pated chords  C'expressif  et  penetrant,"  as 
the  composer  has  marked  them)  in  the 
divided  strings:  a  melody  of  long  breath 
and  enchanting  tenderness.  And  this,  one 
may  venture  to  observe — pace  the  dis- 
senters— is  an  authentic  melody,  though 
it  is  perhaps  not  the  kind  that  Puccini,  or 
Massenet,  or  Mr.  Victor  Herbert,  would 
have  chosen  to  write. 

But  this  brilliant  piece  of  geographical 
denotement  has  none  of  the  magical  fresh- 
ness, the  irresistible  loveliness,  of  "Rondes 
de  Printemps" ;  it  has  none  of  the  ravish- 
ing spontaneity,  the  perfect  grace  and 
fluidity  of  movement,  of  that  incompa- 
rable paean  in  praise  of  the  exquisite 
ardours  of  Spring  and  the  vernal  earth. 
In  "Iberia"  he  is  merely  doing,  with  ex- 
traordinary brilliancy  and  elan^  the  sort 
of  thing  which  many  can  do  with  success 
72 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

and  some  few  with  mastery,  though  none 
with  quite  the  invention  and  manipula- 
tive ease  that  he  displays.  But  in  "Rondes 
de  Printemps,"  in  the  "Apres-midi,"  in 
the  Nature-pieces  for  piano  wherein  he  is 
unaware  of  the  cartographer,  of  bounda- 
ries and  manners  and  customs:  when,  in 
short,  he  is  moving  in  a  region  where  he 
is  sovereign  and  unique,  there  is  no  one 
who  can  throw  upon  the  orchestral  canvas 
such  gleaming  and  enchanted  landscapes, 
such  rhapsodic  yet  luminous  and  delicate 
transcriptions  of  Nature,  as  this  master- 
builder  of  vaporous  and  phantasmal 
worlds. 

Music  and  the  Sea 

"The  sea  .  .  .  the  very  words  even  have  magic. 
It  is  like  the  sound  of  a  horn  in  w^oods,  .  .  .  like 
the  cry  of  wind  leaping  the  long  bastions  of  silence. 
To  many  of  us  there  is  no  call  like  it,  no  other  such 
clarion  of  gladness." — Fiona  Macleod. 

In  a  strange  and  touching  book  by  a 
little-known  mystic  there  is  recounted  a 
73 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

singular  fable  of  the  Celts  concerning 
Manannan,  god  pf  the  sea  and  the  winds. 
Lying  beside  the  shore  of  the  sea,  Manan- 
nan overheard  a  man  and  woman  talking 
together.  "He  heard  the  man  offer  to 
the  woman  love  and  home  and  peace. 
And  the  woman,  who  was  a  creature  of 
the  sea  (or,  as  some  say,  a  sea-woman), 
answered  him,  saying  that  she  would 
bring  to  him  'the  homelessness  of  the  sea, 
and  the  peace  of  the  restless  waves,  and 
love  like  the  wandering  wind.'  Then  the 
man  rebuked  her,  saying  that  she  could 
be  no  woman;  whereupon  she  laughed 
and  entered  the  water.  When  she  had 
vanished,  Manannan  appeared  to  the 
man  in  the  guise  of  a  youth,  and  ques- 
tioned him  concerning  his  love  for  the 
sea-woman.  He  then  proffered  him  ad- 
vice, bidding  him  seek  a  young  girl  whom 
he  would  meet  singing  on  the  heather, 
one  who  would  be  white  and  fair.  But 
for  consolation,  because  of  the  man's  lost 
love  in  the  water,  Manannan  told  him 
74 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

that  he  would  give  him  a  gift;  and  he 
took  a  wave  of  the  sea  and  threw  it  into 
the  man's  heart.  The  man  did  as  he 
was  bid,  wedding  and  dying  and  leaving 
children  after  him.  But  a  mysterious 
thing  befell;  for  he  and  his  children  and 
his  children's  children  knew  by  day  and 
by  night  a  love  that  was  tameless  and 
changeable  as  the  wandering  wind,  and 
a  longing  that  was  unquiet  as  the  rest- 
less wave,  and  the  homelessness  of  the 
sea.  And  that  is  why  they  are  called 
Sliochd  -  na-  mara,  the  Clan  of  the 
Waters." 

It  sometimes  fantastically  seems  as  if 
only  those  who  are  in  an  interior  sense 
children  of  the  sea,  who  are  attuned  to 
what  Mr.  Kipling  has  called  its  "excel- 
lent loneliness"  through  some  secret  inti- 
macy of  the  spirit,  can  capture  its  spell 
and  imprison  it  in  forms  of  beautiful  art. 
Many  poets  have  sung  of  the  sea,  have 
listened  enthralled  to  its  multifarious 
voice;  yet  how  many  have  rendered, 
75 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

through  any  sustained  and  ample  vision, 
a  full  and  eloquent  impression  of  it? 
When  one  recalls  that  the  supreme  Eliza- 
bethan achieved  such  a  phrase  as 

"in  cradle  of  the  rude  imperious  surge"; 

when  one  thinks  of 

"the  unplumbed,  salt,  estranging  sea" 

of  Arnold;  or  of  Swinburne's  wonder- 
ful line, 

"the  deep  divine  dark  dayshine  of  the  sea," 

it  becomes  apparent  that  to  poets  of  very 
diverse  capacities  has  it  been  given  to 
illuminate  by  gleams  this  vast  and  subtle 
theme.  But  those  masters  of  poetic 
speech  whom  one  thinks  of  as  having 
known  long  and  revealing  communion 
with  the  sea:  do  they  not  seem  to  have 
in  their  blood — to  adopt  the  mystical  no- 
tion of  the  ancient  legend  of  the  north 
— the  restless  and  vital  pulse  of  the  sea? 

^6 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

It  is  not  unilluminating  to  think  of  Swin- 
burne, in  whose  verse  the  movement  and 
colour  of  the  sea  are  so  triumphantly  per- 
vasive, as  of  the  children  of  the  wave; 
or  of  Whitman,  with  his  cosmic  chant- 
ings  of  the  vastness  and  mystery  of  the 
deep,  as  of  the  clan  of  the  waters. 

At  the  best,  the  poet  who  would  under- 
take to  convey  any  image  of  the  sea  by 
means  of  words  is  hampered  by  his  ve- 
hicle. It  is  not  necessarily  to  hold  a  brief 
for  the  art  of  music  to  feel  that  the  me- 
dium of  tones  is  incomparably  fitted  for 
rendering  impressions  of  the  sea.  The 
analogies  are  as  obvious  as  they  are  be- 
guiling: there  is  nothing  in  the  visible 
pageant  of  the  natural  world  that  is  more 
completely  the  embodiment  of  movement, 
of  rhythmic  life,  than  the  sea;  nothing 
that  is  so  infinitely  various  in  its  enchant- 
ment; and  music,  pre-eminently  among 
the  arts,  can  convey  the  sense  of  move- 
ment— not  alone  the  quality  of  movement 
that  is  irresistible  and  impelling,  but  the 
77 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

subtler  dynamic  life  that  stirs  almost  im- 
perceptibly under  quiet  surfaces;  and  it 
is  the  most  flexible  and  plastic  of  the 
arts. 

It  would  seem,  then,  as  if  the  sea  must 
have  been  for  the  music-maker  a  contin- 
uous inspiration;  yet  one  will  search 
among  the  pages  of  the  masters  of  three 
centuries  of  instrumental  music — a  pe- 
riod which  covers  almost  its  entire  life — 
without  finding  more  than  a  dozen  im- 
portant examples  of  what  may  be  called 
marine  tone-painting;  and  these  are  all 
virtually  of  our  own  day. 

The  case,  though,  is  not  so  mysterious 
as  it  seems.  To  begin  with,  it  is  clear 
that  the  tone-poet  who  would  attempt  a 
seascape  of  even  small  dimensions  must 
have  at  his  command  an  instrument  of 
great  power,  richness,  and  variety  of  ex- 
pression. Such  a  vehicle  of  expression 
did  not  exist  prior  to  the  second  quarter 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  An  imagina- 
tive composer  who,  in  the  day  of  Johann 
78 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Sebastian  Bach,  let  us  say,  should  have 
endeavoured  to  convey  some  tonal  impres- 
sion of  the  sea  in  one  of  its  majestic,  al- 
luring, or  sinister  moods,  would  have 
been  in  as  embarrassing  a  situation  as  a 
painter  who  should  attempt  a  seascape 
with  an  equipment  consisting  of  a  tube 
of  black  and  a  tube  of  red  paint  and  a 
brush  with  half  a  dozen  bristles,  or  as 
Mr.  Swinburne  would  have  been  had  his 
vocabulary  been  limited  to  that  of  a 
schoolboy  of  sixteen.  Our  suppositi- 
tious eighteenth-century  composer  would, 
in  other  words,  have  lacked  the  necessary 
tools.  The  orchestra  of  his  day  was  a 
poor  and  thin  affair,  deficient  in  number 
and  variety  of  instruments;  and  instead 
of  the  full-voiced  pianoforte  of  our  time 
he  had  nothing  more  expressive  at  his 
command  than  the  gracious  tinkling  of 
harpsichords  and  spinets. 

The  orchestra  as  we  know  it — an  in- 
strument of  expression  that  is  almost  un- 
rivalled in   range   and  eloquence — is   a 
79 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

heritage  from  Richard  Wagner,  who  in 
his  turn  had  received  valuable  sugges- 
tions from  the  experiments  of  that  tumul- 
tuous Romantic,  Hector  Berlioz.  The 
modern  orchestra,  therefore,  and  the 
modern  manner  of  using  it — for  the 
technic  of  orchestration  has  steadily  kept 
pace  with  the  growth  of  the  orchestra  it- 
self— are  both  matters  of  very  recent  his- 
tory; Berlioz  has  been  dead  less  than  half 
a  century,  and  the  magician  of  "Tristan" 
and  the  "Ring"  only  a  generation.  Nor 
has  that  other  eloquent  medium  of 
the  contemporary  tone-poet,  the  piano- 
forte, disclosed  its  full  possibilities  of  ut- 
terance save  within  the  last  few  decades. 
The  vivid  and  delicate  effects  of  colour, 
the  rich  perspectives,  the  superb  sonor- 
ities which  are  familiar  to  us  in  the  piano 
music  of  Brahms,  Grieg,  MacDowell, 
Debussy,  would  have  been  both  techni- 
cally and  mechanically  impossible  in  the 
day  which  saw  the  birth  of  the  Beethoven 
Sonata. 

80 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

It  will  be  seen,  then,  that  only  within 
recent  years  has  the  composer  of  imag- 
inative and  pictorial  instinct  had  at  his 
disposal  adequate  means  for  the  convey- 
ance of  his  thought.  Evidently  for  any 
considerable  music  of  the  sea  we  must 
look  to  the  moderns,  to  the  men  of  the 
last  half-century — the  writers  of  "pro- 
gramme music,"  the  tone-poets  and  tone- 
painters,  the  realists  and  impressionists: 
those  who  have  made  of  music  an  articu- 
late and  expressive  art,  a  medium  of 
dramatic  and  poetical  utterance,  rather 
than  an  art  of  pure  design.  Yet  even  in 
modern  music,  and  despite  the  means 
now  at  their  disposal,  there  have 
been  comparatively  few  music-makers 
who  have,  in  Ossian's  phrase,  "gone  the 
seaward  way."  Musical  art,  from  the 
time  of  the  first  realists,  has  had,  as  we 
have  already  seen,  an  abundance  of  land- 
scapists,  crude  and  meagre  in  achieve- 
ment as,  in  the  earlier  days,  they  neces- 
sarily were.  But  one  cannot  help  won- 
8i 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

dering  at  the  comparative  rarity  in 
musical  history  of  the  tone-poet  of  the  sea. 
Doubtless,  as  it  was  said  at  the  beginning 
of  these  remarks,  the  tribe  of  the  wave  are 
necessarily  few  in  numbers.  The  sea  is 
not  for  all,  nor  even  for  the  truly  imagin- 
ative, a  thing  compact  of  enthralment, 
an  alluring  presence — not  all  could  speak 
of  ''the  many-twinkling  smile  of  ocean." 
There  are  those  whom  it  repels,  for 
whom  the  sense  of  its  vast  loneliness,  its 
unconquerable  mystery,  is  barren  of  any 
enkindling  effect  upon  the  spirit:  there 
are  many  who  might  ask,  "Who  hath  de- 
sired the  sea?"  Not  for  all  is  the  sea  ex- 
hilarating and  arousing.  It  has  its  own 
clan,  those  who  are  subtly  bound  to  it 
through  some  unfathomable  affinity,  who 
will  always  respond  to  its  exultant  or 
secret  call — in  whose  souls  is 

"the  sense  of  all  the  sea." 

But  these  are  few.    Some  among  them 
82 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

are  poets  or  dreamers ;  but  not  many,  even 
of  these,  work  through  the  medium  of  the 
difficult  and  forbidding  art  of  music; 
nor,  alas!  have  all  the  musical  seascap- 
ists  been  either  poetic  or  imaginative. 

One  should  think  first,  perhaps  (I  have 
no  intention  of  pursuing  an  exhaustive  in- 
quiry in  this  desultory  paper),  of  Men- 
delssohn, in  recalling  the  earliest  mu- 
sical sea-painting  which  still  falls  per- 
suasively upon  the  modern  sense.  In  his 
gently  picturesque  and  fanciful  overtures, 
"The  Hebrides,"  "The  Lovely  Melu- 
sina,"  and  "Becalmed  at  Sea  and  Prosper- 
ous Voyage"  (after  Goethe's  little  poems, 
"Meerestille"  and  "Gluckliche  Fahrt"), 
there  is  marine  painting  of  a  kind  which 
to-day  seems  somewhat  lean  in  poetic 
quality,  despite  its  indisputable  grace; 
though  it  should  be  recalled  that  Rich- 
ard Wagner,  on  the  strength  of  certain 
effects  in  the  "Hebrides"  overture,  ac- 
claimed its  composer  as  a  nature-painter 
of  the  first  order — praise  which  could 
83 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

not  have  sounded  as  extravagant  when 
it  was  spoken  as  it  does  in  our  own  time. 
Rubinstein  in  his  ''Ocean"  symphony 
painted  upon  a  far  larger  canvas,  and 
with  a  richer  palette,  than  did  the  precise 
and  conservative  author  of  the  "Heb- 
rides" score.  When  Rubinstein  com- 
posed music  he  wrote  always  out  of  a 
full  heart;  his  moods  and  his  emotions 
were  incomparably  more  intense  and 
more  contagious  than  were  those  of  the 
thinner-blooded  Mendelssohn;  but  his 
deficiency  was,  ultimately,  the  same:  he 
lacked  the  power  of  creating  musical 
ideas — harmonic,  melodic,  rhythmical 
concepts — of  importance  and  enduring 
vitality.  There  is  an  oppressive  pathos  in 
his  "Ocean"  symphony,  his  most  ambi- 
tious and  significant  work.  One  feels,  in 
listening  to  its  plethoric  measures — the 
score  is  immense  in  extent — the  sadness 
which  always  attends  a  piece  of  creative 
art  wherein  the  inspiring  impulse  has 
failed  to  fructify  in  shapes  of  beauty. 
84 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Yet  Rubinstein,  it  is  clear,  was  deeply 
stirred  by  the  sea — especially  the  sea  in 
its  majestic  aspect.  The  rapture  of  it, 
the  fascination  of  its  more  joyous  moods, 
are  not  in  his  music;  yet  within  the  often 
commonplace  exterior  of  this  score  there 
has  been  distilled  something  of  the  au- 
thentic spirit  of  the  ocean  in  its  graver 
condition — one  hears  at  times  the  huge 
and  solemn  voice  of  the  sea,  chanting  its 
immemorial  song  under  lonely  skies. 

There  are  in  the  Wagner  operas  frag- 
ments of  sea-music  which  revive  one's 
persistent  regret  that  the  inventor  of  the 
modern  lyric  drama  did  not  write  more 
for  the  orchestra  alone  and  less  for  the 
stage.  There  is  some  splendid  tone-paint- 
ing of  the  sea  in  its  most  tragic  and  tur- 
bulent moods  in  the  overture  to  "The 
Flying  Dutchman";  and  there  are  a  few 
delectable  touches  of  the  same  graphic 
delineation  in  ''Tristan  and  Isolde."  The 
Russians — Tchaikovsky,  Rimsky- Korsa- 
koff, Glazounoff,  Rachmaninoff — have 
8S 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

essayed,  with  varying  success,  to  fix  upon 
the  symphonic  canvas  something  of  the 
spell  of  deep  waters;  there  is  sea-music 
of  a  not  too  imposing  quality  in  symphon- 
ic poems  by  the  Belgian,  Paul  Gilson, 
the  American,  John  Knowles  Paine,  and 
the  German,  Max  Schillings;  and  for  the 
voice  in  combination  with  instruments 
there  is  a  quantity  of  sea-music  more  or 
less  negligible.  But  until  that  true  and 
lamented  genius,  Edward  MacDowell, 
put  forth,  ten  years  before  his  death,  his 
volume  of  ''Sea  Pieces"  for  the  piano,  it 
is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  ocean  as 
a  theme  for  the  modern  tone-poet  had  not 
achieved  any  searchingly  eloquent  expres- 
sion. 

The  wonder  of  these  eight  short  piano 
pieces,  most  of  which  are  less  than  four 
pages  in  length,  is  that,  within  an  in- 
credibly brief  compass,  and  with  only  the 
monochromatic  keyboard  of  the  piano 
for  their  medium,  they  present  a  com- 
posite picture  of  the  sea  that  is  astonish- 
86 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ing  in  its  variety  and  breadth.  Here  is 
genuine  sea-poetry — poetry  to  match 
with  that  of  Whitman  and  the  author 
of  "Thalassius"  and  "A  Channel  Pas- 
sage." The  music  is  drenched  with  salt 
spray,  wind-swept,  exhilarating;  there 
are  pages  in  it  through  which  rings  the 
thunderous  laughter  of  the  sea  in  its  mo- 
ments of  cosmic  and  terrifying  elation, 
and  there  are  pages  through  which  drift 
sun-painted  mists,  or  wherein  the  inef- 
fable tenderness  of  the  ocean  under  Sum- 
mer stars  is  conveyed  with  a  beauty  that 
is  both  magical  and  deep.  The  range 
of  mood  is  in  itself  singularly  impres- 
sive, passing  from  the  superb  exordium, 
an  apostrophe  "To  The  Sea,"  to  the  melt- 
ing and  solemn  loveliness  of  "Starlight"; 
from  "In  Mid-Ocean" — where  the 
thought  is  of  Whitman's  sea  of 

"brooding  scowl  and  murk" — 

to  the  ominous  and  unquiet  grandeur  of 
87 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"From  the  Depths," — where  again  one 
recalls  the  sea  of  Whitman,  speaking 

"...  with  husky,  haughty  lips." 

These  remarkable  pieces,  which  are  not 
yet  either  adequately  known  or  appraised, 
are  epics  in  little — and  the  littleness,  it 
should  be  noted,  is  wholly  a  quantitative 
matter:  their  spiritual  and  imaginative 
reach  is  not  easily  to  be  measured. 

It  has  been  left,  though,  for  the  most 
original  of  contemporary  music-makers, 
Claude  Debussy,  to  throw  upon  the  spa- 
cious canvas  of  the  modern  orchestra  a 
tonal  picture  of  the  sea  that  is  commen- 
surate both  in  dimensions  and  inspira- 
tion with  the  most  notable  seascapes  in 
literature  and  painting.  Debussy  is,  as 
we  all  know,  at  once  an  iconoclast  and  a 
path-breaker.  He  has  displayed  a  serene 
indifference  toward  many  of  the  sac- 
rosanct canons  of  the  orthodox  musician, 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

and  he  has  created  a  form  of  his  own, 
evolving  through  the  processes  of  a  swift 
and  liberating  inspiration  a  uniquely  fluid 
and  untrammelled  style.  He  is  also,  as 
we  have  noted  in  considering  his  achieve- 
ments as  a  musical  landscapist,  a  dream- 
er, a  mystic,  and  a  man  of  subtle  and 
clairvoyant  imagination.  Now  it  is  fair- 
ly obvious  that  such  a  musician  was  pre- 
destined to  paint  the  sea,  and  in  a  manner 
the  reverse  of  ordinary.  It  will  soon  be 
superfluous  to  praise,  as  I  have  praised  in 
the  foregoing  pages  of  these  casual  and 
rambling  remarks,  such  things  as  his  or- 
chestral setting  of  Mallarme's  ecstatic 
reverie,  "The  Afternoon  of  a  Faun" — 
music  that  is  like  an  iridescent  web  of 
fire  and  dew;  his  exquisite  "Nocturnes" 
(in  one  of  which,  "Sirens,"  there  is  a 
delicious  limning  of  moonlit  waters)  ;  his 
"Rondes  de  Printemps";  his  landscape 
impressions  for  the  piano.  But  it  will 
be  long  before  he  is  adequately  praised 
for  the  least  liked,  yet,  as  some  have 
89 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

thought,  the  largest  and  noblest,  of  his 
symphonic  utterances:  his  orchestral 
"sketches"  (as  he  calls  them),  "La  Mer" 
— the  most  extraordinary  sea-music  that 
has  ever  crystallized  into  tone. 

Debussy  has  what  Sir  Thomas  Browne 
would  have  called  "a  solitary  and  retired 
imagination."  He  has  viewed  the  multi- 
form spectacle  of  the  sea  with  the  pre- 
ternaturally  sharpened  vision  of  the  mys- 
tic— a  mystic  who  is  both  a  poet  and  a 
painter;  and  it  will  have  been  observed 
throughout  these  remarks  that  both  our 
landscapists  and  our  seascapists  in  music 
have  been  viewed  interchangeably  as 
poets  and  painters — for  such,  at  will,  they 
are.  So,  here,  when  Debussy  assumes  to 
depict  in  his  music  such  things  as  "dawn 
and  noon  on  the  ocean,"  "sport  of  the 
waves,"  and  a  "dialogue  of  the  wind  and 
the  sea,"  he  is  at  once  poet  and  painter, 
but  he  is  also  something  more:  he  is  a 
spiritual  mystic.  It  is  not  chiefly  of 
these  things  that  he  is  telling  us,  but  of 
90 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  changing  phases  of  a  sea  of  dreams, 
a  chimerical  sea,  a  thing  of  strange  vi- 
sions and  stranger  voices,  of  fantastic 
colours  and  incalculable  winds — a  phan- 
tasmagoria of  the  spirit,  rife  with  evanes- 
cent shapes  and  presences  that  are  at 
times  full  of  bodement  and  vague  terror, 
at  times  lovely  and  infinitely  capricious, 
at  times  sunlit  and  dazzling.  Yet  be- 
neath these  elusive  and  impalpable  over- 
tones the  reality  of  the  living  sea  persists : 
the  immemorial  enchantment  lures  and 
enthralls  and  terrifies;  so  that  we  come  to 
wonder  if  the  two  are  not,  after  all, 
identical — the  sea  that  seems  an  actual- 
ity of  brine  and  tossing  spray  and  in- 
exorable depths  and  reaches,  and  that  re- 
moter sea,  that  uncharted  and  haunted 
and  incredible  sea,  that  opens  before  the 
magic  casements  of  the  dreaming  mind. 


91 


II 

DEATH   AND   THE   MUSICIANS 


DEATH  AND  THE   MUSICIANS 

The  poets  have  spoken  nobly  of  death ; 
but  in  music  the  idea  of  death  has  not 
been  a  wonted  theme;  and  how  many 
composers,  in  their  occasional  disserta- 
tions upon  the  subject,  have  discoursed 
of  it  with  nobility,  with  exaltation,  with 
spiritual  valour?  The  query  is  an  engross- 
ing one  for  those  who  are  minded  to  re- 
flect upon  the  relation  between  the  art 
of  music  and  the  inner  life  of  man.  When 
Sergei  Vassilievitch  Rachmaninoff,  the 
sombre-souled  Russian  music-maker, 
composed  his  symphonic  poem,  "The 
Island  of  the  Dead,"  after  the  remark- 
able painting  of  Arnold  Bocklin,  he  made 
a  deliberate  attempt  to  do  what  has  sel- 
dom been  essayed  in  music — he  sought  to 
expose  in  tones  a  conception  of  the  idea 
of  death. 

95 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Bocklin's  picture,  of  which  there  are 
several  variants,  is  well  known.  The 
Swiss  painter  might  have  taken  for  its 
motto  the  opening  lines  of  the  sonnet  of 
Thomas  Hood: 

"There  is  a  silence  where  hath  been  no  sound; 
There  is  a  silence  where  no  sound  may  be." 

Indeed,  Bocklin  is  said  to  have  remarked 
of  his  picture  that  "it  must  produce 
such  an  effect  of  stillness  that  any 
one  would  be  frightened  to  hear  a  knock 
on  the  door."  The  lonely,  sunless  island, 
awful  in  its  solitude  and  its  solemnity, 
with  its  frowning  cliffs  and  mournful 
cypress-trees,  rising  out  of  a  windless  sea; 
the  boat  that  is  slowly  nearing  the  har- 
bour with  its  cargo,  the  garlanded  coffin 
and  the  white-robed,  anonymous  figure; 
the  utter  lifelessness  and  isolation,  the  un- 
ending silence,  of  this  desolate  kingdom 
of  shadows — what  music-maker  of  im- 
agination, attracted  by  Bocklin's  sombre 
fantasy,  could  fail  to  be  moved  by  these 

96 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

things  to  eloquent,  or  at  least  sympathetic, 
utterance? 

Rachmaninoff  is  a  tone-poet  of  imag- 
ination. He  demonstrated  that  fact  in 
his  earlier  orchestral  picture,  "The  Clifif" 
(after  a  poem  by  Lermontoflf) — a  piece 
of  tonal  delineation,  half  landscape  and 
half  seascape,  of  extraordinary  breadth 
and  power.  Bocklin's  painting  has 
stirred  him  to  a  greater  depth,  and  to  finer 
issues.  He  has  done  more  than  translate 
into  tone  the  pictorial  substance  and  the 
mood  of  the  picture;  he  is  in  this  music 
both  scene-painter  and  psychologist.  He 
paints  for  us  the  unruffled  sea,  the  sol- 
emn approach  of  the  barge  with  its 
quiet  passengers,  the  dark  and  mysterious 
haven  which  it  nears.  But  he  has  done 
more:  he  has  given  us,  as  it  were,  the 
emotional  background  of  the  picture. 
He  discerns  its  mortal  complement.  He 
remembers  the  grief,  the  lamentation,  the 
loneliness  of  those  who  still  are  of  the 
world — who  have  not  yet  taken  passage 
97 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

upon  that  uncharted  sea  with  that  un- 
hastening  ferryman:  he  remembers  "the 
measureless  waters  of  human  tears." 

His  music  is  thus  not  only  a  faithful 
commentary  upon  the  picture,  but  an  am- 
plification of  its  idea.  He  has  enlarged 
upon  his  text,  though  he  has  told  us  noth- 
ing which  was  not  implicit  in  it.  He  has 
said  more  than  Bocklin  has  said,  but  noth- 
ing that  Bocklin  did  not  connote.  His 
subject,  indeed,  gave  him  neither  oppor- 
tunity nor  excuse  for  saying  anything  in  a 
different  key.  Bocklin's  vision  is  a  fun- 
damentally despondent,  a  fundamentally 
unillumined  one.  The  musician  could 
not  justifiably,  even  if  he  had  cared  to, 
impose  a  different  hue  upon  it.  He  has 
expatiated  with  beauty  and  feeling  upon 
the  theme  which  he  chose;  if  his  discus- 
sion of  it  lacks  exaltation  and  nobility 
we  must  blame  his  choice,  not  his  power 
of  discourse.  There  is  no  aspiration,  no 
elevation,  in  the  music;  there  is  none  in 
the  picture. 

98 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

In  this  work  of  Rachmaninoff's,  there- 
fore, we  find  an  example  of  that  concep- 
tion of  death  which  is  the  prevailing 
conception  with  those  music-makers 
who  have  concerned  themselves  with 
thoughts  of  the  event  which  waits 
upon  mortality,  and  who  have  deliber- 
ately turned  their  meditations  into  mu- 
sical utterance.  The  poets,  admittedly, 
have  dwelt  nobly  upon  the  thought  of 
death.  Disregarding  the  conventional 
literature  of  consolation,  we  may  trace 
backward  for  thirty  centuries  the  steps 
of  those  who  have  walked  "the  small  old 
path  the  seers  knew,"  and  who  have 
strewn  it  thick  with  the  testations  of  an 
illumined  spiritual  vision.  But  music 
contains  few  such  inspired  visions,  apart 
from  the  music  of  the  church.  The  tone- 
poets,  when  they  have  discoursed  of 
death,  have  not  often,  w^ith  Omar,  sent 
their  souls  into  the  invisible;  when  they 
have  brooded  upon  death  they  have,  for 
the  most  part,  brooded  upon  it  in  melan- 
99 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

choly  or  despair;  they  have  been  most 
seizing  and  memorable  as  artists  when 
they  have  been  most  completely  earth- 
bound  as  philosophers.  They  have  gen- 
erally fastened  their  minds  upon  that 
grief  and  lamentation  which  are  the 
human  ministers  of  the  Dark  Angel;  or 
they  have  bent  despairing  or  mournfully 
submissive  eyes  upon  the  River  of  Forget- 
fulness,  reciting,  in  chants  that  are  often 
of  immortal  beauty,  "Matter  is  con- 
queror— matter,  triumphant  only,  con- 
tinues onward."  When  they  have  sent 
their  gaze  beyond  the  open  grave  it  has 
been  only  to  shrink  from  the  thought  of 
that  unknown  region  which,  in  one  of  his 
infrequent  "downcast  hours,"  the  most 
valiant  of  modern  seers  has  dolorously 
apprehended:  "where  neither  ground  is 
for  the  feet  nor  any  path  to  follow,  .  .  . 
no  map  there,  nor  guide,  nor  voice  sound- 
ing, nor  touch  of  human  hand,  .  .  .  nor 
lips,  nor  eyes,  are  in  that  land." 

What  the  music-maker  is  most  apt  to 

ICO 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

produce  when  he  meditates  upon  death 
are  such  threnodies  as  we  have  had  from 
those  two  master  elegists  of  the  tone-art 
— Chopin  and  Tchaikovsky;  and  the  Rus- 
sian typifies  the  more  characteristically 
that  point  of  view  which  has  been  alleged. 
Upon  the  music  of  Tchaikovsky  (and 
this  applies  not  alone,  though  chiefly, 
to  the  "Pathetic"  Symphony)  the  ru- 
mour of  our  mortality  casts  always 
a  menacing  shadow,  even  though  at 
times  it  seems  almost  wholly  absent. 
The  note  of  which  he  is  the  most  perfect 
master  is  the  note  of  lamentation;  and  he 
is  only  completely  himself  when  he  is 
sounding  that  note.  For  Tchaikovsky 
dreaded  with  passionate  protest  what  Sir 
Thomas  Browne  called  "the  iniquity  of 
oblivion."  He  feared  the  thought  of 
death  with  a  shuddering  and  poignant 
terror;  and  into  his  most  sincere  and 
characteristic  deliverance,  the  "Pathetic" 
Symphony  (though  not  only  there),  he 
emptied  all  the  dark  troubles  of  his  heart 

lOI 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

— all  that  he  knew  of  anguished  appre- 
hension and  foreboding,  of  grief  that  is 
unassuageable,  of  consternation  and  de- 
spair. Tchaikovsky  never  divulged  the 
meaning  of  this  incomparably  touch- 
ing music,  but  its  purport  is  un- 
mistakable. Its  burden  is  the  final- 
ity of  death — the  eternal  oblivion  and 
silence  of  the  grave;  and  its  hopelessness 
is  as  manifest  and  indisputable  as  it  is 
utter  and  unrelieved.  He  has  not  here 
incurred  the  calm  reproach  of  Krishna: 
''Thou  hast  grieved  for  those  who  need 
no  grief";  for  his  grief  is  rather  for  him- 
self— for  the  precious  things  of  the  world 
which  he  sees  slipping  irreclaimably 
from  his  grasp ;  for  the  tragedies  and  frus- 
trations of  his  own  life.  This  music — in- 
finitely affecting,  at  times  of  an  almost  in- 
supportable pathos:  in  many  ways  a  won- 
derful, a  unique,  score — this  music  is  sat- 
urated with  the  particular  emotion  which 
moved  Edgar  Allan  Poe  when  he  wrote 

102 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

his     heartbroken     "Dream     Within     a 
Dream": 

"I  stand  amid  the  roar 
Of  a  surf-tormented  shore, 
And  I  hold  within  my  hand 
Grains  of  the  golden  sand: 
How  few!    Yet  how  they  creep 
Through  my  fingers  to  the  deep, 
While  I  weep,  while  I  weep! 
O   God!   can   I   not  grasp 
Them  with   a   tighter  clasp? 
O  God!  can  I  not  save 
One  from  the  pitiless  wave? 
Is  all  that  we  see  or  seem 
But  a  dream  within  a  dream?" 

But  though  Tchaikovsky  is  the  typical 
tone-poet  of  death,  there  is  not  lacking 
in  the  music  of  certain  other  men  a  note 
very  different  from  the  note  which  he 
most  persistently  sounds.  None  of  the 
mystical  poets  has  spoken  with  a  more 
serene  nobility  of  death  than  has  Schu- 
bert in  his  "Death  and  the  Maiden"; 
nor  will  one  find  in  the  most  ecstatic 
meditations  of  those  seers  and  prophets 
103 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

who  have  beheld  supernal  visions  a  more 
sublimated  hymn  to  death  than  that 
which  Wagner,  arch-transcendentalist 
and  mystic,  has  given  us  in  the  transfig- 
ured music  of  Isolde's  "Liebestod" — mu- 
sic of  pure  spiritual  ecstasy,  whose  won- 
drous exaltation  of  mood  could  have 
sprung  from  no  other  source  but  Wag- 
ner's profound  intuition  of  the  luminous 
wisdom  of  the  East.  Nor,  again,  has 
poetry  a  more  elevated  word  to  say  of 
death  than  has  Richard  Strauss  in  that 
noblest  of  his  tone-poems,  "Death  and 
Transfiguration." 

No  one,  I  think,  would  be  far  wrong 
in  saying  that  we  have  in  these  three 
widely  dissimilar  though  fundamentally 
related  works  the  most  spiritually  en- 
nobled and  valorous  declarations  which 
music  has  yet  given  us  upon  the  essential 
theme  of  death — of  death,  that  is  to  say, 
as  a  condition  rather  than  an  event.  In 
the  "Tod  und  das  Madchen"  of  Schubert, 
the  "Liebestod"  of  Wagner,  the  "Tod 
104 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

und  Verklarung"  of  Strauss,  we  have  the 
record,  as  it  were,  of  visions  which  be- 
held death  as  an  accomplishment  either  of 
peace,  or  ecstasy,  or  fulfilment;  but  in 
each  there  is  the  revelation  of  a  thing 
attained;  and  in  each  is  the  signature  of 
a  high  spiritual  intuition.  In  each  the 
music  (if  not  the  composer)  conveys  the 
serene  rebuke  of  Socrates  unto  Glaucon: 
"Are  you  not  aware  that  the  soul  is  im- 
mortal and  imperishable?" 

The  several  visions  differ  widely  in 
character  and  intensity.  The  figure  of 
Death  in  Schubert's  wonderful  song  is 
a  being  of  supreme  benignity — we  think 
(even  though  we  must  make  a  transposi- 
tion of  sex  to  do  so)  of  Whitman's  "dark 
mother  always  gliding  near  with  soft 
feet" ;  and  of  the  strangely  similar,  though 
sublimer,  "great  mother"  of  the  Katha 
Upanishad — the  "great  mother  full  of 
divinity,  who  comes  forth  through  life, 
standing  hid  in  secret."  In  the  glorious 
rhapsody  of  Isolde  we  have  music  which 
105 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

is  as  a  commentary  upon  the  words  of  the 
Master  to  Sauryayanin  Gargya:  "And 
when  he  is  rapt  by  the  radiance,  the  bright 
one  no  longer  sees  dreams.  Then  within 
him  the  bliss  arises."  While  the  majestic 
and  plangent  conception  of  Strauss  again 
recalls  an  evocative  phrase  of  Whitman, 
unwearying  prophet  of  spiritual  resurrec- 
tions :  "the  superb  vistas  of  death."  There 
are  such  vistas  in  this  tone-poem  of 
Strauss's. 

But  there  is  room  for  a  finer  and  loftier 
word  upon  death  than  has  yet  been  said 
in  music — a  word  which  music  is  pre- 
eminently fitted  to  convey.  The  inspira- 
tion for  it  is  to  be  found  in  the  unnum- 
bered messages  of  the  profounder  seers 
as  they  are  luminously  recorded  in  the 
books  of  the  world's  wisdom,  from  the 
Bhagavad  Gita  to  Plato,  from  the  Apoc- 
alypse to  the  seers  and  dreamers  of  to- 
day. "There  is  no  answer  in  words," 
says  a  sage  and  clairvoyant  mystic  of  our 
own  time,  "to  the  question.  What  is  the 
io6 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

great  Beyond?  nor  can  there  be."  That, 
indeed,  concerns  those  things  that  cannot 
be  named.  Yet  music,  whose  prime  func- 
tion it  is  to  transcend  words,  to  supersede 
concrete  expression,  can  sometimes  work 
this  miracle,  and  can  communicate  a 
sense  of  nameless  and  unutterable  things. 
And  so,  perhaps,  it  may  yet  speak  that 
finer  and  loftier  word  upon  death  for 
which  we  have  wished — a  word  which 
shall  convey  the  reality  of  a  vision  joy- 
ous yet  serene,  of  infinite  felicity  and  in- 
efifable  peace.  It  will  be  spoken,  let  us 
predict,  by  one  who  has  "crossed  over 
all  the  sorrows  of  the  heart,"  and  who 
has  found  that  path  which  stretches  far 
away,  by  which  go  "the  Seers  who  know 
the  Eternal";  and  he  will  have  brooded' 
upon  the  words  of  that  revelation  that 
was  made  to  Nachiketas  in  the  ancient 
Books  of  Wisdom — that  revelation  which 
celebrates  "the  resting-place  of  the  world, 
the  endlessness  of  desire,  the  shore  where 
there  is  no  fear,  greatly  praised,  and  the 
107 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

wide-sung  resting-place."  Or  he  may 
look  only  into  his  own  soul,  and  may  thus 
come  to  know  the  truth  as  simply  as  it 
became  known  to  little  Tyltyl  and  Mytyl 
during  their  search  for  the  Blue  Bird, 
in  that  scene  of  inexpressible  and  tender 
sublimity  where  they  seek  him  among  the 
dead  in  the  graveyard;  for  when,  obeying 
Tyltyl's  magic  command,  the  mounds 
open  and  the  graves  gape  wide,  the  lift- 
ing vapours  reveal  only  a  garden  of  flow- 
ering lilies. 

"Where  are  the  dead?"  asks  Mytyl,  in 
bewilderment. 

"There  are  no  dead,"  answers  Tyltyl. 


io8 


Ill 

STRAUSS  AND  THE  GREEKS 


STRAUSS  AND  THE  GREEKS 

There  are  some  who,  noting  the  re- 
current pother  stirred  up  by  the  composi- 
tions of  Richard  Strauss,  may  remember 
the  words  of  Socrates  to  the  Athenians: 
"You  are  vexed,  as  drowsy  persons 
are  when  they  are  awakened."  Surely 
Strauss  is  unequalled  in  all  music  as 
an  awakener!  Whatever  may  be  justly 
said  in  detraction  of  him — and  he  is  full 
of  faults — it  cannot  be  denied  that  he  al- 
ways stirs  the  waters.  The  commotion 
may  bring  up  something  rare  and  pre- 
cious, or  it  may  bring  up  mud;  but  the 
activity  is  indisputable.  He  is  the  most 
dynamic,  the  most  inveterately  alive, 
of  all  music-makers.  For  sheer  en- 
ergy there  is  no  one  to  set  beside  him. 
He  is  often  irritating — and  he  irritates 
by  his  banality  and  triviality  no  less  than 
III 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

by  his  staggeringly  complacent  habit  of 
writing  music  that  seemingly  has 
neither  point  nor  coherence,  neither 
reason  nor  logic.  But  to  be  indiffer- 
ent to  his  address  is  impossible.  He 
can  be  commonplace  with  a  bla- 
tancy  that  sets  the  teeth  on  edge.  He 
can  achieve  a  degree  of  bad  taste  that 
passes  credibility.  His  gamineries  are 
unpardonable.  He  can  offend  and  exas- 
perate with  a  cool  effrontery  that  is  al- 
most engaging.  He  can  be  as  trivial  as 
Bellini,  as  sentimental  as  Gounod,  as 
pompously  empty  as  Meyerbeer.  He  is 
the  most  reckless,  the  most  untamed,  the 
most  preposterous,  the  most  egregious  of 
all  composers.  He  reminds  you  of  what 
Swinburne  said  about  William  Blake: 
that,  "aware  that  he  must  at  least  offend 
a  little,  he  did  not  fear  to  offend  much. 
To  measure  the  exact  space  of  safety,  to 
lay  down  the  precise  limits  of  offence, 
was  an  office  neither  to  his  taste  nor  within 
his  power."   Yet  Strauss  is  irrefragably 

112 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  most  commanding  music-maker  since 
Wagner — one  of  the  great  tone-poets. 
His  capacities  are  difficult  to  bound. 
He  has  written  pages  that  are  among  the 
greatest  in  all  music.  Such  things  as  the 
love  music  in  ''Heldenleben,"  the  tenth 
variation  and  finale  in  "Don  Quixote," 
certain  of  the  songs,  the  recognition  scene 
in  "Electra,"  the  stupendous  opening 
measures  of  "Zarathustra" — music  of  ter- 
rifying, of  cosmic,  sublimity:  things  such 
as  this  the  world  will  not  soon  let  die.  We 
have  mentioned  Blake — of  whom  Strauss 
not  infrequently  reminds  one;  and  it  was 
Blake  who  finely  and  truly  said  that 
music  "exults  in  immortal  thoughts." 
There  are  immortal  thoughts  in  the  mu- 
sic of  Strauss.  At  his  best  he  is  compar- 
able only  with  the  masters.  He  recalls 
that  astonishing  portrait  of  a  famous  pub- 
licist by  John  Sargent,  which,  if  you 
cover  one  side  of  the  face,  suggests  a  dia- 
bolical creature  without  soul  or  con- 
science, whereas,  if  you  cover  the  other 
"3 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

side,  the  face  of  an  inspired  and  noble 
dreamer  emerges  from  the  canvas.  That 
is  Strauss:  an  amazing  and  inexplicable 
compound  of  the  great  and  the  unworthy, 
the  trivial  and  the  sublime,  of  virtue  and 
depravity — a  grotesque  and  disturbing 
phenomenon:  a  being  half  gamin  and 
half  seer,  a  rogue  as  incorrigible  as  his 
own  "Till  Owlglass,"  whose  lips,  though 
they  utter  blasphemies,  have  yet  been 
touched  with  the  sacred  fire :  a  poet  whose 
eyes  behold  apocalyptic  visions  while  his 
hands  play  unspeakable  pranks.  The 
world  has  never  seen  his  like.  He  has 
had  no  precursor.  He  is  an  anomaly — • 
unanticipated,  incomparable. 

He  is  not  yet — he  will  not  be  for  years 
— justly  valued.  There  are  many  who 
will  regard  such  praise  as  I  have 
written  above  as  hyberbole  of  the  most 
unconscionable  sort.  The  man  has  given 
us  a  dozen  masterpieces  of  the  first  rank; 
yet  for  many  he  is  still  a  mountebank, 
a  charlatan,  a  sensationalist,  a  pretentious 
114 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

mediocrity  without  a  single  important 
claim  to  the  esteem  of  his  contempo- 
raries. 

Nothing  could  demonstrate  this  more 
pointedly  than  the  fact  that  what  is  for 
some  his  undoubted  masterpiece  has 
sunk,  during  the  brief  period  since  it  was 
put  forth,  into  a  condition  that  is  almost 
neglect.  It  is  barely  six  years  since 
"Electra"  was  given  to  the  world;  and 
to-day  it  counts  for  almost  nothing  among 
any  but  the  most  devoted  of  Strauss's 
admirers.  Yet  I  believe  that  this  tre- 
mendous music-drama  will  some  day 
take  its  place  among  the  supreme  things 
of  music. 

"Electra,"  at  the  time  of  its  production, 
raised  almost  as  dense  a  cloud  of  critical 
and  journalistic  dust  as  its  immediate 
predecessor,  ^'Salome."  It  would  be 
profitless  to  rehearse  the  details  of  the 
controversy.  A  considerate  providence — 
whose  instrument  one  is  happy  to  recog- 
nize upon  this  occasion  as  Richard 
115 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Strauss  himself — had  so  ordered  matters 
in  the  first  place  that  the  debate,  while 
idly  curious,  idly  sensational,  and  inevi- 
tably stupid,  for  the  most  part,  did  not 
turn,  as  in  the  case  of  "Salome,"  upon 
any  question  of  ethics.  For  that  let  grate- 
ful praise  be  rendered.  Strauss,  by  his 
choice  of  a  dramatic  subject,  left  no  open- 
ing for  the  irruption  into  the  discussion 
of  "Electra"  of  those  frenetic  champions 
of  aesthetic  respectability  whose  capacity 
for  moral  indignation  is  in  inverse  pro- 
portion to  their  capacity  for  lucid  and  in- 
telligent analysis,  and  whose  pursuit  of 
impudicity  in  art  is  as  tireless  as  their 
flair  for  it  is  acute.  They  who  honestly 
deprecated  certain  aspects  of  "Salome" 
were  compelled  to  summon  heroic  quali- 
ties of  self-sacrifice  and  martyrdom;  for 
they  had  to  see  themselves  ranged  on  the 
side  of  a  legion  of  clamorous  defenders  of 
the  public's  moral  health  who  had  never 
taken  the  trouble  to  read  the  play  of 
Wilde  or  hear  the  music  of  Strauss,  and 
ii6 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

whose  ferocious  objections  were  persist- 
ently directed  against  the  wrong  things. 
"Electra"  provides  no  occasion  for  the 
activity  either  of  moral  policemen  or  of 
disquieted  martyrs.  It  has  no  important 
sex  element,  either  conventionally  ro- 
mantic or  supposititiously  illicit.  Objec- 
tion to  the  work  has  been  centred,  first, 
upon  the  alleged  brutality,  violence,  and 
ignoble  horror  of  its  dramatic  basis — the 
play  of  Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal;  and, 
secondly,  upon  the  alleged  recklessness, 
extravagance,  and  general  enormity  of 
Strauss's  score,  its  outrageous  infraction 
of  every  established  law  of  musical  pro- 
cedure. The  latter  charges  are  abun- 
dantly familiar  in  the  case  of  Strauss;  so 
let  us  consider  now  rather  the  character- 
istics of  the  drama  upon  which  he  has 
based  his  remarkable  music. 

Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal  is  young,  a 

"modern,"  a  ''decadent";  and  therein  is 

the  rock  of  his  offending.     One  of  the 

most  acute  of  critics  has  written,  in  a 

117 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

rare  and  little-known  book,  these  memor- 
able sentences:  "There  is  no  inherent 
reason  why  a  poet  of  to-day  should  not 
overtake  the  same  themes  as  ^schylus 
overtook  from  Phrynicus,  and  Sophocles 
from  ^schylus,  and  Euripides  from  all 
three.  .  .  .  The  difficulty  is  not  in  the  re- 
moteness of  the  theme,  still  less  in  the  es- 
sential substance.  It  is  in  the  mistaken 
idea  that  the  ancient  formal  method  is  in- 
evitable, and  in  the  mistaken  idea  that  a 
theme  sustained  on  essential  and  ele- 
mental things  and  therefore  independent 
of  unique  circumstance  can  be  exhausted 
by  the  flashing  upon  it  of  one  great  light. 
.  .  .  Tradition  says,  if  you  would  write 
of  the  slaying  of  Clytemnestra  you  must 
present  a  recognisable  Electra  and  a  rec- 
ognisable Orestes;  .  .  .  but,  to  the  spirit, 
Electra  and  Orestes  are  simply  abstract 
terms  of  the  theatre  of  the  imagination 
.  .  .  and  the  old  Greek  background  is 
but  a  remembered  semblance  of  a  living 
stage  that  is  not  to-day  what  it  was  yes- 
ii8 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

terday  or  shall  be  to-morrow,  and  yet  is 
ever  in  essentials  the  same."  It  is  doubt- 
ful if  Herr  von  Hofmannsthal  ever  read 
those  obscure  and  forgotten  words;  yet 
he  might  seek  and  find  in  them,  if  he 
cared  to,  a  singularly  anticipated  justifi- 
cation for  the  impiety  which  has  been 
charged  against  him — that  of  "modern- 
izing" (as  it  has  been  called)  ^Eschylus, 
Sophocles,  and  Euripides.  He  has  been 
sternly  reprehended  because  his  Electra 
and  Orestes  are  not  "a  recognisable  Elec- 
tra and  a  recognisable  Orestes";  and  the 
thrice-familiar  epithets  of  contemporary 
denigration  have  been  conferred  upon 
him — his  play  is  "lurid,"  "morbid," 
"neurotic";  and  its  lack  of  the  "classic 
purity"  of  the  Greek  originals  is  missed 
and  lamented.  All  of  which  is  either  un- 
true or  beside  the  mark. 

Von  Hofmannsthal  has  chosen  to  con- 
struct a  tragedy  out  of  the  ancient  tale 
which  inspired  the  "Electra"  of  Soph- 
ocles and  Euripides  and  the  middle  play 
119 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

of  ^schylus's  "Oresteia"  trilogy,  the 
"Choephorae."  He  has  gone  for  his  plot 
to  the  drama  of  Sophocles,  the  action  of 
which,  in  the  main,  he  follows.  As  in 
the  play  of  Sophocles,  Electra  is  the  pro- 
tagonist— Orestes  is  the  mere  instrument 
of  her  purpose.  Von  Hofmannsthal  has 
italicised  and  intensified  the  theme 
of  her  unquenchable  grief,  her  con- 
suming and  invincible  passion  for  retri- 
bution. He  has  made  her  an  extraordi- 
nary dramatic  creation.  As  he  conceives 
her,  she  is  incarnate  hate,  its  very  type 
and  image — a  ragged,  glaring,  dis- 
hevelled Maenad:  a  "wild  cat,"  say  the 
servants,  who  screeches  and  snarls  in  her 
execrations,  and  dwells  among  the  dogs 
in  the  courtyard;  while  to  her  mother  she 
is  a  "puff-adder."  In  her  "poor,  sad  cor- 
ner," says  Electra,  she  lives,  yet  does  not 
live,  feels  nothing  that  women  feel.  She 
has  taken  hatred  for  her  bridegroom,  and 
only  curses  and  despair  have  come  forth 
out  of  her  body.    Yet,  tattered,  degraded, 

120 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

outcast  as  she  is,  there  is  nothing  in  the 
world,  says  one  of  the  serving-women, 
so  royal  as  she  is — "she  lies  in  rags  upon 
the  threshold,  ay,  but  there  is  none  in  the 
house  that  can  endure  to  look  into  her 
eyes." 

It  is  in  the  conception  of  this  vivid  and 
truly  appalling  figure  that  the  dramatist 
has  fallen  foul  of  his  critics,  many  of 
whom  appear  to  cherish  the  belief  that 
her  prototype,  the  Electra  of  Sophocles, 
was  a  very  different  sort  of  person.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  heroine  of  Sophocles's 
play  is  by  no  means  an  altogether  noble 
or  exalted  character.  The  Greek  Elec- 
tra tells  of  her  "shrill-toned  shrieks"; 
she  demands  "satisfaction  with  blood  for 
blood";  the  Chorus  speaks  of  her  as 
"breathing  rage"  in  her  interview  with 
her  mother;  and  at  the  moment  when 
Orestes  strikes  down  Clytemnestra  we 
hear  her,  as  we  hear  her  descendant  in 
the  play  of  von  Hofmannstahl,  urge  on 
her    brother    to    "strike,    if    thou    hast 

121 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

strength,  a  double  stroke."  The  learned 
Buckley,  in  the  introduction  to  his  trans- 
lation of  Sophocles's  play,  speaks  of  Elec- 
tra  as  "a  virago  almost  bereft  of  female 
feelings";  he  speaks  of  her  "love  that 
has  been  sharpened  into  keen  hatred,"  of 
her  "vindictive  wrath,"  of  her  "accumu- 
lated bitterness,"  her  mournings  that 
teem  with  selfishness.  Nor  have  other 
commentators  a  kinder  word  to  say  of 
her.  She  is  a  dreadful  figure  in  Soph- 
ocles; she  is  a  dreadful  figure  in  von 
Hofmannsthal.  It  is  wiser,  in  consider- 
ing the  play  of  the  modern  dramatist,  to 
abstain  from  Pecksniffian  comparisons, 
especially  when  these  are  based  upon 
premises  that  are  ynsound.  The  just 
view  will  regard  it  apart  from  its  classic 
prototypes,  as  a  modern  fantasy  upon  an 
antique  theme,  dealing  with  passions 
that  are  independent  of  any  age  or  any 
country — with  the  universal  and  timeless 
stuff  of  tragedy. 

Considered  thus,  von  Hofmannsthal's 

122 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

tragedy  must  be  appraised  as  a  remark- 
able and  an  impressive  work.  Its  power 
is  irresistible.  It  is  steeped  in  the  atmos- 
phere of  tragic  horror,  but  this  horror  is 
wholly  upon  the  plane  of  imaginative 
communication;  there  is  nothing  to  shock 
the  eye  of  the  spectator;  the  catastrophe 
occurs,  after  the  Greek  fashion,  off  the 
stage.  The  suggestion  of  impending 
doom,  of  an  inescapable,  intangible,  cum- 
ulative dread,  is  established  and  main- 
tained with  a  surety  and  power  which 
completely  possess  the  mind.  The  play 
contains  nothing  so  fearful  to  the  sight  or 
to  the  mind  as  the  tableau  at  the  close  of 
^schylus's  *'Choephorae,"  when  Orestes 
is  revealed  standing  over  the  body  of  his 
slain  mother,  with  the  horror  of  the 
thronging  Furies  growing  in  his  eyes ;  nor 
has  it  anything  to  cause  the  horripilation 
which  must  have  been  felt  by  the  Athen- 
ians at  the  shambles  disclosed  by  the  roll- 
ing back  of  the  eccyclema  at  the  conclu- 
sion of  the  "Agamemnon." 
123 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

It  is  undeniable  that  the  drama  would 
be  stronger,  and  that  it  would  have  an 
elevation  which  it  now  lacks,  if  von  Hof- 
mannsthal  had  put  greater  stress  upon 
the  Greek  conception  of  vengeance  as  a 
religious  duty — the  idea  which,  more 
than  anything  else,  exalts  and  ennobles 
their  tragedy.  It  is  true  that  Orestes,  in 
the  modern  "Electra,"  has  a  speech  in 
which  he  declares  that  he  knows  the  gods 
have  laid  the  deed  upon  his  soul,  and 
that  they  will  spurn  him  if  he  shudders 
at  it;  but  there  is  no  such  insistence  upon 
this  motive  as  we  find  in  the  Greek  plays. 
Nor  can  it  be  denied  that  the  play  lacks 
simplicity  and  economy  of  diction,  and 
that  the  models  which  have  served  in  the 
elaboration  of  its  details  are  at  times  ob- 
vious. There  is  a  quality  of  speech,  a 
certain  use  of  symbolistic  expression,  that 
comes  straight  out  of  Maeterlinck;  there 
is  imagery  which  reminds  us  that  the 
''Salome"  of  Oscar  Wilde  is  highly  ap- 
preciated in  Germany  and  Austria.  In 
124 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

the  speeches  of  Clytemnestra,  Electra, 
Chrysothemis,  there  is  much  rhetoric — 
some  of  it  beautiful,  poetical,  strikingly 
eloquent;  some  of  it  artificial  and  over- 
sophisticated.  Electra  herself  is  at  times 
as  elliptical  and  enigmatic  of  speech  as 
Hilda  in  Ibsen's  "Master  Builder."  She 
is  prone  to  ruminate  elaborately  and  at 
length,  when  she  should  be  direct  and 
sparing  of  utterance  and  unhesitating  in 
action.  And  there  are  times  when  she 
philosophises  upon  the  nature  of  hate  and 
love  as  mystically  and  superfluously  as 
the  transfigured  daughter  of  Herodias 
in  the  final  scene  of  the  tragedy  of  Wilde. 
At  such  moments  we  are  far  indeed  from 
both  the  spirit  and  the  letter  of  Greek 
tragedy.  But  for  all  its  derivations,  arti- 
ficialities, and  excrescences,  the  play  has 
indisputable  power,  and  at  its  finest  it 
has  beauty  and  imagination  of  a  high 
order.  It  strikes  the  authentic  note  of 
tragic  terror  and  tragic  awe,  and  from 
it  issues  at  times  "the  terrible  whisper  of 
125 


J^ATURE    IN    MUSIC 

destiny";  so  that  one  recalls  again  the 
calm  and  tolerant  words  of  him  whose 
wisdom  has  before  been  adduced,  and 
who  knew  that  we  may  legitimately  see 
Electra  and  Orestes,  not  as  either  iEschy- 
lus  or  Sophocles  has  revealed  them  to  us, 
but  as  revealed  to  a  vision  that  is  of  to- 
day, "shaped  from  the  mould  that  moulds 
the  spirit  of  to-day,  and  coloured  with  the 
colour  of  to-day's  mind." 

i^schylus's  Cassandra,  entering  trem- 
blingly the  Palace  of  the  Atridae  to  meet 
the  death  which  she  knows  is  awaiting 
her  there,  cries  out  in  terror  that  she 
detects  an  odour  which  reeks  "like  the 
breath  of  charnels."  There  is,  in  the 
"Electra"  of  von  Hofmannsthal  and 
Strauss,  a  similar  exhalation  for  the 
imagination — an  oppressive  and  unnam- 
able  menace  in  the  air,  a  pervading  at- 
mosphere of  terror,  of  unspeakable  per- 
turbation. This  mood  is  implicit  in  the 
texture  of  the  play;  but  it  is  marvellously 
126 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

enforced  and  intensified  in  the  music  of 
Strauss. 

The  music-drama  was  performed  for 
the  first  time  at  the  Dresden  Royal  Opera 
in  January,  1909.  It  thus  followed  "Sa- 
lome," its  immediate  predecessor,  after  an 
interval  of  three  years.  The  first  thing  to 
be  said  is  that  "Electra"  succeeds,  where 
"Salome"  failed,  in  being  an  almost  con- 
tinuously fitting  expression  of  its  subject- 
matter,  von  Hofmannsthal's  drama.  The 
nature  of  this  subject-matter  is  of  a  char- 
acter which  taxes  the  expressional  capac- 
ity of  Strauss  where  it  is  strongest,  and 
not,  as  in  "Salome,"  where  it  is  weakest. 
Strauss  has,  as  a  rule,  been  curiously  in- 
effective in  his  treatment  of  the  emotions 
of  sex,  and  in  "Salome"  the  music  is  least 
satisfying  in  the  passages  wherein  the 
composer  sought  to  delineate  the  desires 
of  the  uneasy  protagonist  of  Wilde's 
play.  But  Strauss  has  a  superlative  gift 
for  rendering,  through  the  potency  of 
tonal  imagery,  moods  of  terror,  suspense, 
127 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

awe,  foreboding,  ominous  and  sinister 
gloom.  He  has  a  power  of  communicat- 
ing the  characteristic  emotion  of  tragic 
horror  which  continually  reminds  one  of 
Webster  at  his  best.  He  is  primarily  a 
musical  tragedian,  whose  imagination  is 
most  congenially  and  profitably  employed 
when  it  is  dealing  with  the  darker  and 
more  dreadful  stuff  of  tragedy. 

"Electra"  gives  him  precisely  the  kind 
of  subject  which  he  is  most  fortunate  in 
depicting.  Regarded  simply  as  a  tonal 
italicisation  of  the  action  and  emotions 
of  the  play  it  is  superbly  successful.  It 
has  a  cyclonic  sweep  and  power,  a  demo- 
niacal intensity,  which  are  well-nigh  un- 
bearable in  their  assault  upon  the  nerves. 
From  the  abrupt  and  sinister  opening  to 
the  wildly  triumphant  close  the  grip  of 
the  music  relaxes  for  scarcely  a  moment — 
and  when  it  does  momentarily  relax,  it 
is  significant  to  observe,  it  is  in  the  pas- 
sages which  Strauss  has  designed  to  de- 
128 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

note   the  conjugal   longings  of   Chryso- 
themis. 

In  its  quality  as  sheer  music  the  score 
displays  in  a  marked  degree  the  strange 
blending  of  strength  and  weakness,  of 
genius  and  futility,  of  inspiration  and 
paltriness,  which  are  characteristic  of 
every  phase  of  Strauss's  intellectual  activ- 
ity. There  are  wonderful  things  in  it — 
passages  which  no  one  but  Strauss  would 
have  dared  or  accomplished.  Of  such  are 
the  interview  between  Electra  and  her 
mother,  the  passage  in  which  the  sisters 
mourn  the  death  of  Orestes,  the  inimi- 
tably ironic  scene  in  which  Electra  lights 
^gisthus  to  his  doom,  and,  above  all,  the 
profoundly  affecting  recognition  scene 
between  Electra  and  her  brother:  here 
we  have  once  more  the  deeper  and  finer 
Strauss,  the  supremely  moving  and  in- 
spired tone-poet  who  portrayed  the  home- 
coming and  the  death  of  Don  Quixote, 
who  gave  us  the  tranquil  close  of  ''Ein 
Heldenleben."  This  scene  is  the  musical 
129 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

apogee  of  the  work.  It  has  a  richness 
of  emotion,  a  depth  of  sorrowful  tender- 
ness, which  set  it  among  the  noblest  things 
in  music.  But  side  by  side  with  these 
memorable  passages  are  others  which  are 
far  from  memorable — passages  in  which, 
as  so  often  with  Strauss,  the  music  de- 
clines from  power  and  vitality  into  a 
lamentable  emptiness  and  commonness, 
and  we  get  pages  of  the  most  arrant  and 
undisguised  commonplace;  as,  for  exam- 
ple, in  the  music  accompanying  the  la- 
ment of  Chrysothemis  over  her  single 
and  childless  state — music  which  is  con- 
spicuous for  its  melodic  sentimentality 
and  its  trivial  waltz  rhythms — and  in  the 
famous  dance  of  Electra  which  brings  the 
work  to  an  end  in  a  veritable  orgy  of 
inflated  banality. 

Much  might  be  said  of  the  bland  au- 
dacity, the  superhuman  ingenuity,  the  in- 
credible mastery  of  technical  resources, 
which  have  gone  to  the  making  of  this 
astonishing  score;  but  they  are  its  least 
130 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

Important  aspects,  and  they  have  in  the 
past  been  abundantly  dwelt  upon,  gasped 
at,  denounced,  applauded.  It  is  better  to 
insist  that  this  score  is  masterly  in  its 
dramatic  truthfulness,  the  constancy  with 
which  the  eye  of  the  composer  is  fixed 
upon  the  object  to  be  depicted.  It  is  full 
of  his  typical  qualities.  Strauss  displays 
here,  as  elsewhere,  almost  every  defect 
except  weakness;  that  he  never  has.  He 
may  exasperate  by  his  commonness,  his 
effrontery,  his  crudity,  his  inanity,  his 
folly,  or  by  his  often  unabashed  senti- 
mentality. But  weakness — of  that  he 
cannot  justly  be  accused;  as  it  has  been 
said  of  another,  he  has  limitations,  but 
no  infirmities.  He  never  halts  or  fum- 
bles; he  has  a  superb  assurance.  His 
mastery  of  his  imaginative  material  and 
of  his  technic  is  absolute.  He  never  fails 
to  give  one  a  sense  of  power.  There  is 
always,  too,  something  of  the  cyclopean  in 
Strauss.  He  startles  us  by  the  mag- 
nitude of  his  conceptions,  the  vast- 
131 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ness  of  his  designs,  the  huge  sweep 
of  his  brush  over  the  orchestral  can- 
vas. He  may  shock  us  by  his  crass- 
ness,  or  distress  us  by  his  silliness,  or 
annoy  us  by  his  banality;  but — and  this 
is  the  essential  point — he  never  loses  his 
grip  upon  us.  His  magnetism  is  contin- 
ually operative,  even  when  (and  the  state- 
ment is  not  paradoxical)  it  repels. 


132 


IV 


THE  QUESTION  OF  OPERA  IN 
ENGLISH 


THE  QUESTION  OF  OPERA  IN 
ENGLISH 

In  writing  not  long  ago  upon  that  far 
too  acrimoniously  debated  subject,  Opera 
in  English,  Mr.  Henry  Edward  Kreh- 
biel  genially  recalled  the  broad  smile 
which,  in  the  lamented  days  of  the 
National  Opera  Company's  struggles 
with  lyric  drama  in  the  vernacular, 
used  to  overspread  the  audience  when  the 
impersonator  of  Lohengrin,  in  the  course 
of  the  scene  before  the  cathedral,  pealed 
forth  in  stentorian  song  the  deeply  im- 
pressive words,  *'Elsa!  with  whom  con- 
versest  thou?"  A  quarter  of  a  century 
has  passed  since  that  memorable  and  ill- 
starred  attempt  to  establish  here  opera  in 
the  speech  of  the  people;  yet  it  was  only 
a  brief  while  ago  that  those  who  wit- 
nessed the  production  of  Mr.  Frederick 
135 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

S.  Converse's  opera,  "The  Sacrifice," 
heard  one  of  the  characters  sing  this  line 
— a  line  enclosed  by  music  of  character- 
istically modern  intensity:  "Captain  Bur- 
ton, my  dear  aunt  wishes  to  see  you." 
And  who  can  forget  that  moment  in 
Colonel  Savage's  English  version  of 
"Parsifal"  a  few  years  ago  when  the  guile- 
less hero  repulsed  the  temptress  in  the 
garden  with,  "Pernicious  one!  Get  thee 
from  me!" 

Now,  it  is  undeniable  that  a  prejudiced 
opponent  (if  there  be  any  such)  of  the 
project  of  giving  opera  in  the  English 
language  might  not  ineffectively  dispose 
of  the  entire  question  by  citing  these 
three  examples  of  how  opera  in  English 
really  works  out  in  practice.  The  Eng- 
lish-speaking Lohengrin  whose  words 
amused  the  National  Opera  Company's 
audiences  was,  beyond  reasonable  doubt, 
employing  the  best  available  English 
translation  of  Wagner's  text;  so  was  the 
English-speaking  Parsifal.  The  lady  in 
136 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Mr.  Converse's  opera  who  bore  a  mes- 
sage from  her  aunt  was  speaking  an 
original  English  text,  devised  by  the  com- 
poser himself  for  musical  setting.  Yet 
in  each  case  that  illusion  of  exalted 
speech  which  opera  must  maintain,  if  it 
does  nothing  else,  was  for  a  time  rudely 
and  utterly  destroyed.  For  my  own  part, 
since  I  am  anything  but  a  prejudiced  op- 
ponent of  whatever  ideals  seem  to  make 
for  aesthetic  enlargement,  I  cheerfully 
grant  that  these  instances  are  very  far 
from  proving  the  case  against  English 
opera:  they  simply  show  what  it  is  ca- 
pable of  at  its  worst.  Also  they  serve  to 
point  an  essential  distinction  which 
should  be  made,  but  which  seldom  is 
made,  by  those  who  discuss  this  perennial 
question.  They  who  talk  of  "opera  in 
English"  are  apt  to  confuse  two  totally 
different  things:  operas  written  to  orig- 
inal English  texts,  and  operas  sung  with 
texts  translated  from  the  German  or 
French  or  Italian  into  the  vernacular.  It 
137 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

is  clear,  of  course,  that  we  are  dealing 
here  with  two  separate  matters;  with 
ideals  and  ambitions  that  are  by  no  means 
synonymous;  with  projects  that  differ 
widely  in  merit  and  in  viability.  It  is 
one  thing  to  long  for  and  to  promote 
operas  written  by  American  composers  to 
English  texts ;  it  is  quite  another  thing  to 
long  for  and  to  promote  the  performance 
of  operas  by  Wagner,  Gounod,  Puccini, 
with  translated  texts.  Mr.  Converse's 
"The  Sacrifice"  is  one  thing:  a  homoge- 
neous product  in  which  the  music  and  the 
words  (whatever  their  separate  virtues) 
were  made  for  each  other;  "Lohengrin" 
in  English  is  a  wholly  different  thing: 
an  attempt  to  substitute  for  words  that 
belong  to  Wagner's  music,  words  that  do 
not  belong  to  it  and  that  cannot  be  made 
to  belong  to  it.  There  is  bound  to  be 
futility  in  any  discussion  of  "opera  in 
English"  which  does  not  recognise  that 
there  are  really  these  two  distinct  ideas 
included  under  the  loosely  applied  title. 
138 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

The  plea  that  is  most  generally  made 
for  singing  all  foreign  operas — whether 
German,  Italian,  Bohemian,  French,  or 
Russian — with  texts  translated  into  Eng- 
lish, is  that  it  is  highly  desirable  that 
American  audiences  should  understand 
the  words  that  are  sung  by  Siegmund  and 
Romeo,  Tosca  and  Melisande,  Turridu 
and  the  Queen  of  Spades:  that  inasmuch 
as  operas,  whether  foreign  or  native,  are 
as  a  rule  sung  in  the  vernacular  when  they 
are  performed  in  Paris  or  Berlin  or  Mi- 
lan, it  is  absurd  and  anomalous  to  ask  a 
New  Yorker  to  listen  to  "Aida"  or  "Tris- 
tan und  Isolde"  or  "Thais"  sung  in  lan- 
guages which  he  cannot  understand;  and 
that  Opera  can  never  be  truly  "educa- 
tional" until  it  can  be  readily  compre- 
hended by  the  most  ignorant. 

Now  there  are  so  many  fallacies,  so 
many  false  premises,  bound  up  in  this  in- 
disputably plausible  argument,  that  it  is 
hard  to  disengage  them  all.  The  first 
thing  that  may  be  said  in  response  to 
139 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

those  who  long  for  the  advent  of  what 
may  be  called,  for  convenience,  "Angli- 
cised opera"  (to  distinguish  it  from  Eng- 
lish opera — that  is,  opera  in  which  the 
original  text  is  in  the  vernacular)  is  that 
its  realisation  is  not  a  thing  of  the  future, 
but  of  the  past.  Every  student  of  operatic 
history  in  America  knows,  if  he  takes  the 
trouble  to  think  back  over  the  records, 
that  Anglicised  opera  is  an  old  story  in 
this  country.  It  has  been  tried  again  and 
again,  as  it  doubtless  will  be  tried  again 
and  again  in  the  future.  The  American 
Opera  Company  tried  it  at  the  Academy 
of  Music  in  1886,  and  later  tried  it  again 
as  the  National  Opera  Company.  Oscar 
Hammerstein  tried  it  at  the  old  Manhat- 
tan Opera  House  as  early  as  1893.  The 
redoubtable  Colonel  Savage  tried  it  for 
years  in  Boston,  in  New  York,  in  "the 
provinces,"  and  we  heard  even  "Meister- 
singer,"  "Parsifal,"  and  "Walkiire"  in 
Anglicised  versions.  And  it  is  still  be- 
ing tried.  The  Century  Opera  Company 
140 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

of  New  York  is  to-day  giving  meritorious 
second-rate  performances  of  standard 
operas  in  the  vernacular. 

So  it  is  not  altogether  easy  to  see 
why  the  champions  of  Anglicised  opera 
should  be  cast  down,  or  why  they 
should  go  to  the  length  of  forming  so- 
cieties for  the  furtherance  of  their  hopes. 
But  they  insist  that  they  will  not  rest 
until  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  hear  in 
this  country  an  opera  sung  in  the  lan- 
guage to  which  the  music  was  written. 
If  that  is  the  way  of  musical  salvation, 
well  and  good;  but  is  it?  Even  the  evan- 
gelists of  the  new  faith  admit  that  it  has 
certain  undesirable  features,  but  they  re- 
fuse to  acknowledge  the  really  grave  ob- 
jections that  may  be  raised  against  it. 

The  most  serious  of  these  objections 
may  be  stated  briefly  thus:  There 
is  no  such  thing  as  a  satisfactory 
operatic  translation — and  in  using  the 
epithet  "satisfactory"  I  am  exercising 
an  exemplary  moderation.  Some  are 
141 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

less  heinous  than  others;  but  most 
translations  of  operatic  texts,  espe- 
cially into  English,  are  a  source  of  genu- 
ine distress  to  anyone  who  is  able  to 
understand  the  original.  Music  which  is 
written  to  express  a  particular  set  of 
words  cannot  be  made  to  express  a  quite 
dififerent  set  of  words.  In  the  first  place, 
the  musical  accent  will,  unavoidably,  fall 
time  and  again  upon  the  wrong  words  or 
the  wrong  syllables.  Specific  examples 
will  make  this  clear.  Wagner,  in 
setting  Venus's  words  near  the  close 
of  the  first  scene  of  "Tannhauser," 
''Nicht  half  ich  dir!"  naturally 
stressed  the  word  nicht,  setting  it  as  a 
high  and  sustained  G.  In  Lady  Macfar- 
ren's  translation  (the  standard  one)  this 
line  becomes,  *'I  hold  thee  not!"  with  the 
stress  falling  erroneously  and  absurdly  on 
the  "I."  Or  turn  to  the  seduction  scene 
in  the  second  act  of  "Parsifal"  and  ob- 
serve the  grotesque  misfit  of  Mr.  Cor- 
der's  English  text,  in  comparison  with 
142 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  concise  and  exquisite  conformity  of 
Wagner's  words  and  music,  at  Kundry's 
phrase,  '^Der  Liebe  ersten  Kuss."  Of 
course  the  last  word  is  the  essential  word, 
and  Wagner  has  so  treated  it;  but  in  Mr. 
Corder's  English  version  its  equivalent, 
"kiss,"  falls  in  an  entirely  different  place 
and  is  sung  to  a  comparatively  subordi- 
nate note.  Or,  yet  again,  examine  Mr. 
Henry  G.  Chapman's  English  text  (one 
which  is  much  above  the  average  of  its 
kind)  to  "Pelleas  et  Melisande."  ''Vous 
etes  un  geant"  (Act  I,  Scene  I)  becomes, 
"A  giant's  what  you  are,"  which  is  not 
only  feeble  and  foolish  in  itself,  but  is 
completely  at  odds  with  Debussy's  ac- 
centing of  the  French  words.  Later 
(Act  III,  Scene  IV),  ''A  propos  de  la 
lumiere"  becomes,  "  'Tis  about  the  light 
or  something,"  with  the  musical  stress 
falling  vapidly  upon  "or  something"  in- 
stead of  upon  lumiere.  Later  still  (Act 
IV,  Scene  I),  Melisande's  words,  "Je  te 
verrai  toujours/^  become,  "I  shall  al- 
143 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ways  see  you,"  with  "see  you"  stressed  in- 
stead of  toujours.  Examples  could  be 
multiplied  indefinitely:  there  is  scarcely 
a  translated  opera  score  that  does  not 
yield  instance  after  instance  of  this  sort 
of  maladjustment. 

In  the  second  place,  apart  from  the 
difficulty  of  devising  a  substitute  set  of 
words  that  will  fit  at  every  point  the  com- 
poser's scheme  of  musical  accentuation, 
there  is  not  only  the  formidable  difficulty 
of  preserving  the  actual  sense  of  the  orig- 
inal text,  but  the  almost  insuperable  dif- 
ficulty of  preserving  its  connotations — 
its  virtually  untranslatable  intimations  of 
feeling  and  shades  of  fine  significance. 
The  English  translators  have  naturally 
not  been  able  to  surmount  these  difficul- 
ties. Those  who  insist  on  listening  to 
Wagner  in  English  must  be  prepared  to 
hear  Wotan's  '^Unverschdmt  und  iiber- 
begehrlich  macht  euch  Dumme  mein 
Dank''  rendered  as,  "Shame  devoid  and 
shockingly  covetous  such  conduct  I  call" ; 
144 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

to  hear  the  ^'Treuloser  Holder!  Seligste 
FrauT'  of  Isolde  and  her  knight  de- 
claimed as  "Faithless  enfolderl  Blissful- 
est  bride  1"  In  "Carmen"  they  will  hear 
Micaela  in  her  prayer  sing,  "I'll  speak  in 
her  face  of  my  duty,"  instead  of  ''Je  par- 
lerai  haut  devant  elle" ;  and  Don  Jose  will 
say,  "  'Tis  she  my  heart  is  bent  on,"  in- 
stead of  ^'Je  la  prendrai  pour  femme." 
In  "Tosca"  they  will  hear  Mario's  pas- 
sionate "...  Tanto  la  Vita!"  sobbed  out 
as,  "So  dear;  no,  never!" 

Such  fatuities  are  present  in  all  oper- 
atic translations,  even  the  best;  in  most 
of  them  they  are  rife.  A  man  would  need 
to  be  a  musician  and  a  poet  of  inspiration 
and  fabulous  skill  in  order  to  achieve  the 
task  of  providing,  say,  "Siegfried,"  with 
a  viable  English  text,  let  alone  one  that 
would  give  satisfaction  to  an  appreciative 
lover  of  the  original.  The  adherents  of 
Anglicised  opera  do  not  appear  to  realise 
that  the  musical  setting  of  a  text  is  in- 
dissolubly  bound  up  with  the  particular 


NATURE    IN   MUSIC 

genius  of  the  language  employed  by  the 
composer.  Tristan's  '^Ach,  Isolde,  wie 
schon  bist  du!"  easily  translatable  though 
it  is,  loses  something  definite  and  precious 
as  soon  as  one  attempts  to  turn  it  into  any 
language  save  German.  And  one  cannot 
help  pitying  from  the  bottom  of  one's 
heart  the  plight  of  the  translator  con- 
fronted with  the  reiterated  ^'petit  pere" 
of  the  child  Yniold  in  "Pelleas  et  Me- 
lisande" — "dearest  father"  is  the  best  that 
Mr.  Chapman  can  do  with  it. 

The  question,  then,  naturally  arises, 
Why  go  to  such  pains  to  achieve  so  dis- 
appointing a  result?  Is  it  fair  to  the 
composer?  Is  it  conducive  to  a  just  ap- 
preciation of  masterworks?  Is  it  in  any 
true  sense  "educational"  to  present  a  deli- 
cately adjusted  combination  of  words 
and  music  in  such  a  way  that  their  rela- 
tionship is  distorted  and  their  signifi- 
cance belied?  Would  it  not  be  better 
to  encourage  the  hearer  to  acquire  a 
146 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

working  knowledge  of  the  few  languages 
in  which  opera  is  usually  sung  in  this 
country?  Or  he  might  resort  to  the  sim- 
pler expedient  of  familiarising  himself 
with  a  translation  of  the  libretto  in  ad- 
vance. The  answer  is  made  that  what  is 
good  enough  for  the  Germans  and  the 
French  and  the  Italians  should  be  good 
enough  for  us:  that  if  Berlin  can  stand 
"Carmen"  in  German,  we  ought  to  be 
able  to  stand  it  in  English.  But  surely 
it  is  Berlin's  misfortune,  not  its  happi- 
ness, that  it  cannot,  as  we  can,  hear  "Car- 
men" sung  in  the  language  to  which  it 
was  composed.  There  is  no  other  coun- 
try in  the  world  where  one  can  enjoy 
the  inestimable  privilege  of  hearing  most 
of  the  operatic  masterworks  as  their  com- 
posers intended  them  to  be  heard — where 
in  one  theatre  within  one  week  it  is  pos- 
sible to  hear  "Carmen"  in  French,  "Tris- 
tan" in  German,  "Tosca"  in  Italian. 
Why,  in  the  name  of  all  that  is  enlight- 
147 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ened,  should  we  seek  deliberately  to  im- 
pose upon  ourselves  the  limitations  of  less 
fortunate  peoples — to  barter  our  unique 
advantage  for  the  dubious  privilege  of 
hearing  Micaela  say,  ''I'll  speak  in  her 
face  of  my  duty" ;  of  hearing  Tristan  ad- 
dressed as  "faithless  enf older";  of  hear- 
ing, "So  dear;  no,  never!"  pealed  to  the 
strains  of  Mario's  well-loved  song  of  de- 
spairful reminiscence? 

Let  us  now  consider  the  much  more 
agreeable  subject  of  English  opera — 
operas  composed  to  original  English 
texts.  Here  is  a  matter  that  invites  a 
hopeful  attitude  on  the  part  of  the  mu- 
sical publicist.  Of  course  there  is  not 
the  slightest  question  that  the  production 
of  operas  by  native  composers  set  to  texts 
in  the  vernacular  is  a  highly  desirable 
thing.  No  one  who  is  interested  in  the 
growth  of  a  native  musical  art  but  would 
rejoice  to  see  operas  by  American  com- 
posers, sung  in  the  vernacular,  estab- 
lished in  the  regular  repertoire  of,  say, 
148 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  Metropolitan  Opera  House.  But  ob- 
viously, of  course,  you  must  first  catch 
your  composer,  not  to  speak  of  your 
librettist.  The  story  of  native  opera- 
making  in  this  country  reaches  back  to 
the  eighteenth  century,  but  not  many  of 
those  now  living  can  remember  anything 
anterior  to  George  F.  Bristow's  "Rip  Van 
Winkle,"  produced  at  the  Academy  of 
Music,  New  York,  in  1855,  and  W.  H. 
Fry's  "Leonora,"  given  at  the  same 
house  three  years  later.  But  we  can  all 
recall  Mr.  Walter  Damrosch's  "Scarlet 
Letter,"  which  he  brought  forward  in 
1896,  and  his  later  "Cyrano";  and  the 
exhibition  of  Mr.  Converse's  "Pipe  of 
Desire"  and  "The  Sacrifice,"  of  Mr.  Her- 
bert's "Natoma"  and  "Madeleine,"  of 
Professor  Parker's  "Mona,"  are  matters 
of  very  recent  history.  In  none  of 
these  works  is  there  the  breath  of 
life.  Either  by  reason  of  weak  or  ama- 
teurish librettos  or  dull,  derivative,  medi- 
ocre music,  they  have  fallen  short  of  the 
149 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

standard  which  must  be  maintained  if 
our  native  operatic  art  is  to  have  anything 
more  than  a  parochial  interest  and  im- 
portance. It  seems  odd  that  it  should 
need  to  be  said,  yet  there  are  many  who 
fail  to  perceive  the  glaringly  evident 
and  frequently  stated  truth  that  a  poor 
opera  is  no  better  for  having  been  com- 
posed by  an  American. 

It  is  pleasant  to  hope,  it  is  possible  even 
to  believe,  that  there  are  now  living  in 
this  country  composers  capable  of  pro- 
ducing effective  and  distinguished  lyric 
dramas.  There  is  no  lack  of  available 
texts.  Certain  plays  by  Mr.  Yeats,  by 
William  Sharp,  by  Stephen  Phillips,  for 
example,  are  admirably  suited  to  operatic 
treatment.  The  English  language,  heed- 
fully  and  poetically  employed,  is  a  noble 
and  an  eloquent  vehicle  for  musico- 
dramatic  speech.  It  is  futile  to  attempt 
to  make  impressive  operas  with  the  kind 
of  librettos  used  by  Mr.  Herbert  in  "Na- 
toma"  and  Mr.  Converse  in  "The  Sacri- 
150 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

fice."  The  artistic  and  memorable  Eng- 
lish opera  will  contain  no  verse  of  the 
quality  of  Mr.  Redding's 

"Gende  maiden,  tell  me, 
Have  I  seen  thee  in  my  dreams, 

I  wonder? 
When  above  my  pillow 
From  the  night  fell  starry  gleams, 

I  wonder?" 

nor  such  lines  of  dialogue  as  Mr.  Con- 
verse's egregious  "Captain  Burton,  my 
dear  aunt  wishes  to  see  you."  It  will  do 
no  good  for  the  composer  who  permits 
himself  to  accept  such  things  to  point  an 
exculpatory  finger  at  the  preposterous 
librettos  of  certain  operatic  master- 
works.  "The  Magic  Flute"  and  "Trova- 
tore"  prevail,  of  course,  despite  their 
librettos,  not  because  of  them.  It  is  ab- 
surd to  suppose  that  the  composer  of  to- 
day is  justified  in  setting  a  weak  or  foolish 
libretto  merely  because  Mozart  and 
Verdi  were  indifferent  or  undiscriminat- 
151 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ing  enough  to  be  willing  to  do  so.  And, 
moreover,  it  is  not  easy  to  write  music 
which,  like  theirs,  can  make  us  forget  the 
poverty  or  silliness  of  its  literary  and 
dramatic  subject-matter. 

There  is,  besides,  the  question  of  secur- 
ing singers  of  the  first  rank  who  can  make 
themselves  understood  in  English. 
Doubtless  they  can  be  trained  to  do  it. 
The  process  will  be  difficult,  but  it  is  not 
impossible  of  accomplishment.  When 
an  opera  in  the  vernacular  can  be  en- 
trusted to  singers  who  will  enunciate  the 
English  text  with  the  lucidity  and  intelli- 
gence exercised  upon  French  by,  for  ex- 
ample, the  unforgettable  Maurice  Ren- 
aud,  English  opera  will  seem  a  less  elusive 
dream  than  it  does  at  present. 


152 


A  NOTE   ON   MONTEMEZZI 


A   NOTE   ON    MONTEMEZZI 

To  an  observer  of  the  musical  heavens 
the  discovery  of  a  new  composer  is  as 
thrilling  an  event  as  the  discovery  of  a 
new  star  must  be  to  those  who  watch  the 
more  fruitful  heavens  of  actuality.  By  "a 
new  composer"  one  means,  of  course,  a 
new  composer  of  parts — one  who  speaks 
with  a  voice  that  is  arresting  by  reason 
of  its  beauty,  or  its  volume,  or  its  distinc- 
tion. To  have  lived  in  the  day  of,  say, 
Wagner's  emergence  must  have  been  an 
electrifying  experience  indeed — though 
there  is  the  hideous  possibility  that  even 
the  most  liberal,  the  most  unimpeded," 
among  us  might  have  reacted  to  him  as 
did  Ruskin  to  "Die  Meistersinger," 
which  he  dismissed,  with  delightful 
vehemence,  as  an  "affected,  sapless,  soul- 
less, tuneless  doggerel  of  sounds;  ...  as 
155 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

for  the  great  Lied,  I  never  made  out 
where  it  began  or  where  it  ended,  except 
by  the  fellow's  coming  off  the  horse- 
block." But  if  we  cannot  all  have  been 
present  on  that  incomparable  occasion, 
there  are  many  of  us  who  have  had  the 
scarcely  less  inestimable  privilege  of 
watching  the  wonder  and  loveliness  of 
a  ''Pelleas"  flush  the  tonal  skies  with 
a  beauty  as  magical  and  melancholy 
as  an  autumn  sunset,  or  have  seen  an 
"Electra"  flame  in  those  selfsame  skies 
like  the  terrible  burning  star  of  the 
Apocalypse,  the  name  of  which  was 
wormwood,  and  which  embittered  the 
waters  into  which  it  fell — "and  many 
men  died  of  the  waters,  because  they  were 
made  bitter":  and  there,  perhaps,  is  the 
fitting  motto  for  what  I  am  about  to  say. 
How  is  one  to  know  whether  the 
flaming  star  is  a  fact  or  an  hallucination? 
How,  that  is  to  say,  are  we  to  know 
whether  our  new  composer  is  worthy  of 
our  liking  or  not?  We  fancy  the  candid 
156 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

pessimist  would  tell  us  that  we  may  know 
the  authentic  from  the  delusive  by  re- 
membering the  words  of  the  Scriptural 
narrative  that  we  have  just  quoted.  Are 
the  waters  embittered  by  the  burning  star? 
If  they  are,  then  (says  our  candid  pessi- 
mist) you  may  know  that  Genius  has 
come  upon  the  earth.  Has  any  genius — 
has  any  genuinely  creative  composer — 
ever  failed  to  embitter  the  waters? 
When  Ruskin  called  the  music  of 
"Meistersinger"  a  "soulless,  tuneless,  dog- 
gerel of  sounds"  he  merely  echoed  the 
opinion  of  most  of  the  critics  and 
many  of  the  public  of  his  time.  We 
all  remember  how  the  most  impor- 
tant music  composed  since  the  death  of 
Wagner — the  music  of  Debussy  and 
Richard  Strauss — was  greeted  by  those 
who  should  have  been  the  first  to  an- 
nounce and  extol  it.  So  that  it  might  al- 
most be  stated  as  a  critical  axiom  that 
you  may  know  a  masterpiece  by  the  bit- 
terness it  precipitates;  and  that  a  work 
157 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

which  is  hailed  upon  its  appearance  as  a 
masterpiece  is — something  quite  differ- 
ent. The  new  work  of  an  innovating 
genius  will  always  taste  bitter  in  the 
mouth  to  all  save  a  few.  If  it  does  not — 
if  its  flavour  delights  the  palate  at  once — 
let  the  heedful  beware! 

All  of  which  is  prefatory  to  a  consid- 
eration of  a  new  opera,  by  a  new  com- 
poser, which  has  made  more  noise  in 
America  than  any  lyric  novelty  of  recent 
years.  I  refer  to  Italo  Montemezzi's 
''L'Amore  dei  Tre  Re,"  the  production  of 
which  in  New  York  was  the  occasion  of 
general  and  indisputably  sincere  rejoic- 
ings— rejoicings  which  would  have  been 
a  fit  greeting,  indeed,  for  a  new  "Tris- 
tan und  Isolde,"  and  which  awoke,  in  the 
memories  of  some,  ironic  recollections 
of  the  quite  different  reception  that 
marked  the  disclosure  of  "Pelleas  et 
Melisande"  and  "Electra." 

Montemezzi  is  a  wholly  new  appari- 
tion in  the  operatic  field,  so  far  as  the 

158 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

world  at  large  Is  concerned.  He  Is  young 
— in  the  early  thirties;  and  his  native 
Italy  had  seen  the  production  of 
"L'Amore  del  Tre  Re"  only  a  year  be- 
fore it  was  given  In  New  York.  Nor  is 
the  dramatist  who  has  supplied  the  lit- 
erary basis  of  his  opera  much  better 
known  outside  of  Italy.  Sem  Benelli  is 
a  contemporary  Italian  poet,  whose  name 
is  often  bracketed  by  his  countrymen 
with  that  of  Gabriele  D'Annunzio;  but 
few  non-Latin  readers  are  familiar  with 
his  work.  His  "L'Amore  dei  Tre  Re" 
is  a  "tragic  poem"  in  three  acts.  It  is  a 
play  that  might  have  been  written  for 
musical  enlargement,  so  ideally  suited  is 
it  to  the  purposes  of  the  lyric  stage.  It 
is  almost  as  spare,  as  free  from  accessory 
elements,  as  is  Wagner's  "Tristan." 

Flora,  wife  of  Manfredo,  is  a  young 
princess  who  has  been  wedded  against 
her  will  to  the  son  of  the  conqueror  of 
her  people.  She  loves  Avito,  and,  in  her 
husband's  absence,  gives  herself  to  him. 
159 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

The  blind  and  aged  Archibaldo,  jealous 
of  his  son's  honour,  surprises  her  in  the 
arms  of  her  lover  and  strangles  her.  As 
she  lies  dead  he  smears  her  lips  with 
poison,  thinking  to  entrap  her  lover  when 
he  shall  come  to  kiss  her.  But  it  is  not 
Avito  alone  whom  he  entraps ;  Manf  redo, 
too,  kisses  desperately  the  poisoned  lips 
of  Flora;  and  Archibaldo,  entering  then, 
and  thinking  he  has  caught  the  lover, 
wraps  his  arms  about  the  body  of  his 
dying  son.  It  is  a  heart-shaking  utter- 
ance of  the  sightless  old  king  upon  which 
the  curtain  closes: 

"Ah!  Manf  redo!  Manf  redo!  Anche  tu,  dunque, 
Senza  rimedio  sef  con  me  nell'ombra !" 

It  is  said  by  those  who  best  know  Ital- 
ian that  Signor  Benelli  has  accomplished 
in  this  play  a  dramatic  poem  of  con- 
spicuous excellence  as  literature.  Upon 
that  point  I  have  no  right  to  an  opinion. 
But,  quite  aside  from  its  literary  quality, 
the  play,  as  a  drama  for  the  lyric  stage,  is 
1 60 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

beyond  question  admirable.  It  is  simple, 
sensuous,  passionate.  It  has  power  and 
pathos. 

Would  that  one  could  honestly  avoid 
saying  that  it  is  worthy  of  a  more  gifted 
composer  than  Signor  Montemezzil  Let 
it  be  admitted  at  once,  with  all  hearti- 
ness, that  Montemezzi  is  a  musician  who 
commands  respect.  He  is  a  composer  of 
evident  scholarship,  of  indubitable  feel- 
ing, of  deep  seriousness  and  sincerity.  It 
is  certain  that  he  has  been  profoundly 
moved  by  the  drama  he  has  undertaken 
to  set,  and  that  he  is  quite  single-minded 
in  his  endeavour  to  heighten  and  intensify 
it  in  his  music.  He  is  obviously  not  con- 
cerned about  wooing  the  ears  of  the 
groundlings.  He  has  given  us  a  score 
in  which,  from  beginning  to  end,  there 
is  not  a  measure  that  can  justly  be  called 
meretricious;  a  score  that  makes  no  ad 
captandum  appeal  whatsoever.  He  has 
applied  himself  with  undivided  earnest- 
ness and  devotion  to  the  task  of  setting 
i6i 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

forth  his  dramatic  theme  with  all  the  en- 
hancing power  of  which  he  is  capable. 
There  is  here  no  defect  of  intention,  but 
only  a  defect  of  capacity.  If  dramatic 
music  of  the  highest  order  could  be 
achieved  without  inspiration,  then  Mon- 
temezzi  would  have  given  us  a  master- 
work  to  which  we  all,  without  exception, 
could  offer  homage.  But  for  my  part, 
I  see  no  profit  in  judging  a  work  of  art 
save  by  the  criterion  of  the  best.  To  extol 
a  new  work  because  it  is  not  so  bad  as 
some,  or  because  its  composer  is  very 
young  and  may  do  better,  or  because  he 
might  have  done  worse,  seems,  to  say  the 
least,  beside  the  point.  I  have  a  stub- 
born conviction  that  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  a  second-rate  masterpiece.  The 
supreme  obligation  of  music  is  to  be  elo- 
quent: if  it  is  not  eloquent,  it  has  failed. 

It  has  been  intimated  that  Montemezzi 

is  entitled  to  some  kind  of  credit  because 

he  is  different  from  Puccini.    Now  it  is 

certain   that   Signor   Puccini   has  many 

162 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

faults,  and  has  committed  many  aesthetic 
indiscretions.  His  place  is  assuredly  not 
with  the  high  gods  of  music.  But  he  can 
be  eloquent;  and  he  has  unescapable  in- 
dividuality— the  two  indispensable  vir- 
tues which  Signor  Montemezzi  has  not 
Montemezzi's  ideas  lack  distinction;  but, 
what  is  worse,  they  lack  character.  His 
music  is  wanting  in  profile;  it  has  no 
marked  personality.  It  has  feeling,  it  is 
rhetorically  impressive;  but  of  true  imag- 
ination it  has  little.  I  should  not  think 
of  denying  that  the  scene  in  "L'Amore 
dei  Tre  Re"  which  arouses  the  greatest 
enthusiasm  in  its  hearers — the  love  scene 
of  the  second  act — is  extremely  effective 
and  exciting;  Montemezzi  has  written 
music  for  this  scene  which  is  an  excellent 
imitation  of  the  real  thing — music  which 
the  incautious  and  the  non-exigent  would 
assuredly  defend  as  eloquent  beyond  ques- 
tion. But  it  is  not  a  difficult  thing  for 
the  resourceful  composer  of  to-day  so  to 
manipulate  the  marvellous  expressional 
163 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

resources  that  modern  music  has  acquired 
from  the  masters  of  the  past  that  all  but 
the  most  wary  are  beguiled  into  thinking 
that  they  are  listening  to  the  authentic 
speech  of  inspiration.  Plagiarism  is  not 
implied,  for  plagiarism  is  unnecessary.  A 
commonplace  melody,  if  it  be  large- 
moulded  and  passionate  in  accent,  and  ut- 
tered in  an  ascending  crescendo  by  the 
wonderful  myriad-voiced  orchestra  that 
is  now  at  the  disposal  of  any  accom- 
plished craftsman,  can  suggest  with  ex- 
traordinary similitude  the  veritable 
tongue  of  genius.  But  that  is  not  what 
I  mean  by  eloquence  in  music.  I  mean 
the  kind  of  eloquence  that  stabs  the  spirit 
like  a  flaming  sword;  that  strikes  the 
mind  with  an  instant  conviction  that  an 
immortal  saying  has  been  uttered;  that 
floods  the  heart  with  something  that  is 
part  exquisite  ecstasy  and  part  exquisite 
pain;  that  opens  to  the  inward  eye,  for  a 
brief  moment,  a  vision  of  the  heights 
where  eternal  Loveliness  dreams  its  eter- 
164 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

nal  dream,  and  makes  us  know  that  we 
have  seen 

"Beauty  itself  amid 
Beautiful  things." 

It  is  no  pleasure  to  disparage  so  ear- 
nest, so  dignified,  so  scrupulous,  so  high- 
minded  a  musician  as  Signor  Monte- 
mezzi,  especially  as  it  is  possible  for  the 
most  exacting  to  listen  with  true  pleasure 
to  many  pages  of  his  opera,  wherein  is 
to  be  found  a  persuasive  expression  of 
feeling  that  is  always  sincere  and  deep. 
But  to  say  or  to  imply  that  he  has  pro- 
duced a  score  which  is  worthy  to  be 
named  in  the  same  breath  with  a  work  of 
essential  genius  like  "Pelleas  et  Meli- 
sande,"  or  like  "Electra,"  or  even  like 
"Der  Rosenkavalier,"  is  merely  to  darken 
counsel. 

When  all  is  said,  however,  one  is  far 

from  being  insensible  to  a  certain  pathos 

that  is  implicit  in  this  noble  and  sincere, 

yet  disappointing  expression  of  the  indis- 

i6s 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

putable  talent  of  this  true  artist — the 
pathos  that  envelops  all  those  who  love 
with  passion  beautiful  things:  who  try  to 
speak,  however  haltingly,  however  brok- 
enly, of  those  mysteries  which,  after  all, 
are  beyond  speech:  who  are  dreamers  of 
dreams:  who  have  seen,  and  cannot  for- 
get; yet  who  are  not  without  consolation: 
for  they  know  that  "there  will  come  a 
time  when  it  shall  be  light,  and  man  shall 
awaken  from  his  lofty  dreams,  and  find 
his  dreams  still  there,  and  that  nothing 
has  gone  save  his  sleep." 


1 66 


VI 
THE  PLACE  OF  GRIEG 


THE  PLACE  OF  GRIEG 

It  is  a  singular  fact,  for  which  one 
need  not  pretend  to  account,  that  in  mu- 
sical criticism  (the  youngest,  most  un- 
reasoned, and  most  unguided  of  the  arts) 
one  is  seldom  made  aware  that  a  distinc- 
tion has  been  drawn  between  what 
Matthew  Arnold  liked  to  call  the  "real" 
and  the  "historic"  estimates.  Yet  it  is 
difficult  to  see  how  we  can  arrive  at  any 
just  appraisal  of  music  or  of  creative  mu- 
sicians unless  this  vital  difference  is  held 
steadily  before  the  mind.  For  example, 
it  has  been  perfectly  possible  for  modern 
critics,  recognising  only  the  historic  esti- 
mate, blithely  to  rank  the  admirable 
Haydn  as  a  major  symphonist;  yet  imag- 
ine— one  need  not  say  Arnold,  but  any 
sensitive  and  responsible  critic  of  letters 
— ranking,  for  example,  Pope  as  a  major 
169 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

poet!  Arnold,  it  will  be  recalled,  in  de- 
fining what  he  means  by  the  "historic 
estimate"  of  poetry,  observes:  "the  course 
of  development  of  a  nation's  language, 
thought  and  poetry,  is  profoundly  inter- 
esting; and  by  regarding  a  poet's  work  as 
a  stage  in  this  course  of  development  we 
may  easily  bring  ourselves  to  make  it  of 
more  importance  as  poetry  than  in  itself 
it  really  is":  that  is,  we  may  fall  easily 
into  the  error  of  mistaking  the  historic 
significance  of  the  "Chanson  de  Roland," 
or  of  the  verse  of  Pope,  or  Dryden,  for 
an  essential  significance  which,  as  poetry, 
it  does  not  possess.  We  may  fall,  through 
carelessness  or  indifference,  into  such  an 
error;  but  we  do  not  expect  a  deliberate 
and  reasoned  criticism  of  letters  to  ex- 
hibit carelessness  or  indifference:  we  do 
not  expect  it  to  fail  of  distinguishing  be- 
tween the  artistic  stature  of  Pope  and 
Shelley,  of  Dryden  and  Keats.  Yet  how 
often  does  our  musical  criticism  distin- 
guish in  its  judgments  between  a  purely 
170 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

historic  estimate  and  a  real  estimate  of 
Haydn,  of  much  of  Mozart,  of  the  lesser 
Beethoven?  The  reason,  it  may  be  said 
again,  is  not  germane  to  this  discussion: 
the  fact  alone  is  pertinent. 

Of  Edvard  Grieg,  the  most  widely  and 
excusably  popular  music-maker  since 
Mendelssohn,  it  would  be  easy  to  say  that 
it  is  not  now  possible,  since  he  has  been 
dead  so  short  a  while,  to  form  any  historic 
estimate  which  should  be  in  the  least  con- 
clusive. But  the  objection  would  not  be  a 
valid  one:  Grieg's  relation  to  the  past 
of  musical  art,  to  its  development,  to  its 
present  condition — even  to  its  auguries  of 
the  future — is  not  in  the  least  difficult 
to  perceive.  But  it  is,  I  conceive,  far 
more  interesting  and  rewarding  to  view 
his  art  in  itself;  to  attempt  to  arrive  at 
an  estimate  of  its  absolute,  rather  than 
is  historic,  significance. 

Let  us  consider  first,  as  a  convenient 
point  of  approach,  the  claims  which  have 
been  made  for  him,  and  the  faults  which 
171 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

have  been  charged  against  his  art.  The 
most  persistent,  and  the  most  absurd, 
claim  that  has  been  advanced  for  him  is 
that  he  was  pre-eminent  as  an  exponent 
of  nationalism  in  music.  It  is  a  claim 
which  is  as  negligible  as  it  is  unsubstan- 
tiated. We  could  still  affor  1  to  ignore 
this  aspect  of  his  art  even  if  it  were  not 
true,  as  Mr.  Henry  T.  Finck,  in  his  in- 
imitable survey  of  Grieg's  career  and 
works,  affirms,  that  instead  of  exclaiming 
over  his  music:  "How  delightfully  Nor- 
wegian!" we  should  say:  "How  delight- 
fully Griegian!"  That  Grieg,  an  ardent 
and  uncompromising  patriot,  made  much 
of  his  artistic  allegiance  to  Norwegian 
soil  is  of  little  significance.  As  the 
French  critic,  Ernest  Closson,  wrote, 
"Grieg  has  so  thoroughly  identified  him- 
self with  the  musical  spirit  of  his  coun- 
try that  the  roles  have  become,  as  it  were, 
reversed.  His  personality — a  personality 
which  in  itself  has  nothing  in  common 
with  the  music  of  the  people — seems  to 
172 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

have  become  the  prototype  of  this  same 
music  of  the  people;  and  the  composers, 
his  compatriots,  imitate  and  copy  him 
quite  innocently  in  the  belief  that  they 
are  simply  making  use  of  local  colour." 
It  is  not  intended  to  dispose  too  summar- 
ily or  cavalierly  of  a  principle  which  to 
a  very  large  number  of  intelligences  is  of 
deep  import;  but  it  remains  an  indisput- 
able fact  that  "nationalism"  in  music  has 
never  constituted  a  valid  claim  to  creative 
eminence.  Who  are  those  in  musical  art 
who  have  been  conspicuous  as  expo- 
nents of  nationalism?  Not  Bach,  not 
Beethoven,  not  Schubert,  not  Schumann, 
not  Wagner,  not  Brahms,  not  Tchai- 
kovsky; rather  they  have  been  minor 
prophets  like  Dvorak  and  certain  of  the 
Russians — those  Liszt-sprung  "barbar- 
ians"— contemporaries  of  the  Tchaikov- 
sky at  whom  they  sneered — whose  music 
is  far  more  eloquent  of  the  salon  and  the 
academy  than  of  the  forests  and  steppes. 
Therefore,  one  may  be  permitted,  with 
173 


NATURE   IN    MUSIC 

all  possible  deference,  to  leave  the  ques- 
tion of  Grieg's  Scandinavianism  to  spe- 
cialists in  the  discovery  and  exploitation 
of  aesthetic  patriotism,  where  it  will  be 
sure  of  adequate  discussion. 

Claims  have  been  made  for  Grieg, 
upon  the  purely  artistic  side,  which  have 
done  his  fame  a  very  positive  harm.  He 
was  called  "the  greatest  of  living  com- 
posers, with  the  possible  exception  of 
Saint-Saens" — an  amazing  exception!  It 
was  said  at  the  time  of  his  death  that  he 
had  "created  the  latest  harmonic  atmos- 
phere in  music" ;  that  he  was  "one  of  the 
most  original  geniuses  in  the  musical 
world  of  the  present  or  past";  that  his 
songs,  in  melodic  wealth,  are  surpassed 
only  by  Schubert's;  that  in  "originality  of 
harmony  and  modulation"  he  is  surpassed 
only  by  Bach,  Schubert,  Chopin,  Schu- 
mann, Wagner  and  Liszt;  that  in  his  or- 
chestration he  "ranks  among  the  most  fas- 
cinating." These  claims  have  been  delib- 
erately and  responsibly  made,  and  they 
174 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

have  been  passionately  defended;  yet  that 
they  can  have  been  seriously  urged  seems 
well-nigh  incredible.  As  to  the  melodic 
w^ealth  of  his  songs,  do  they  surpass  in 
this  respect  the  songs  of  Schumann  or 
of  Franz?  As  to  "the  latest  harmonic 
atmosphere  in  music,"  Grieg's  harmony, 
in  comparison  with  that  of  his  contempo- 
rary, Claude  Debussy,  sounds  as  com- 
fortably unventuresome  as  do  the  naive 
metres  of  Herrick  beside  the  strange 
rhythms  and  subtle  assonances  of  Mr. 
Yeats.  In  "originality  of  harmony"  does 
Grieg  compare  for  a  moment  with  those 
who  were  writing  at  the  same  time  he  was 
— with  Vincent  d'lndy,  with  Richard 
Strauss,  with  Charles  Martin  Loeffler?  As 
for  his  "fascinating  orchestration,"  where 
does  it  stand  in  comparison  with  the 
gorgeously  imaginative  scoring  of  Rim- 
sky- Korsakoff,  the  superb  instrumentation 
of  Strauss,  the  exquisite  orchestral  mastery 
of  Debussy  and  Loeffler?— magicians  be- 
side whom  Grieg,  for  all  the  delicacy  and 
175 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

charm  of  his  scoring,  seems  like  a  tenta- 
tive amateur.  Does  the  music  of  the 
Norwegian  tone-poet  deserve,  is  it  helped 
by,  such  ruthless,  wholesale,  and  incon- 
siderate praise? 

On  the  other  hand,  let  us  see  what  cer- 
tain of  his  detractors  have  found  to  urge 
against  his  art.  The  disapproval  of  his 
critics  has  been  most  pithily  summed  up, 
perhaps,  by  Mr.  Daniel  Gregory  Mason, 
who  reproaches  Grieg  because,  he  holds, 
he  "is  never  large  or  heroic";  because 
"he  never  wears  the  buskin."  "He  has 
neither  the  depth  of  passion  nor  the  in- 
tellectual grasp  needed  to  make  music  in 
the  grand  style."  Probably  of  all  his 
peculiarities,  complains  Mr.  Mason,  "the 
most  significant  is  the  shortness  of  his 
phrases  and  his  manner  of  repeating 
them  almost  literally,  displaced  a  little 
in  pitch,  but  not  otherwise  altered.  .  .  . 
His  thoughts  complete  themselves  quick- 
ly; they  have  little  span,  and  they  are 
combined,  not  by  interfusion,  but  by  jux- 
176 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

taposition.  He  never  weaves  a  tapestry; 
he  assembles  a  mosaic."  Intricacy  of  de- 
sign, largeness  of  span,  synthetic  power, 
are  qualities  to  be  recognised  and  ap- 
plauded; but  are  they  essential  to  a  mas- 
terpiece? Have  they,  finally,  anything  to 
do  with  the  matter?  What  innate  super- 
iority, per  se,  has  "a  broad-spanned  arch 
of  melody,"  a  phrase  of  large  sweep  and 
wide  scope,  over  a  "short-breathed" 
phrase?  Consider,  for  instance,  that  ex- 
tremely familiar  masterpiece-in-little,  the 
dirge,  "Aase's  Tod,"  from  the  first  "Peer 
Gynt"  suite.  "Short-breathed"  in  struc- 
ture it  undeniably  is,  wholly  naive  in  its 
contrivance;  yet  is  it  any  less  deeply  and 
largely  tragic,  less  fine  and  memorable, 
less  admirable  a  masterpiece,  for  being 
so?  What,  in  the  end,  have  expanse  and 
magnitude,  intricacy  and  elaborateness 
of  plan,  to  do  with  the  case?  Is  it  true, 
as  a  somewhat  impatient  appraiser  of 
Grieg  has  lately  affirmed,  that  artists  who 
have  carried  their  inspiration  "through 
177 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

a  long  and  arduous  process  of  eloquent 
exposition"  are  necessarily  to  be  more 
greatly  honoured  than  those  who  have 
completed  their  inspiration  within  a 
briefer  flight?  The  contention  has,  be- 
yond doubt,  a  deceptive  force:  a  great 
epic  seems,  at  first  glance,  obviously  su- 
perior to  a  great  lyric.  There  is  Schu- 
bert's "Erlkonig,"  a  superb  song,  of  long 
flight,  of  broad  scope;  there  is  his  "Der 
Tod  und  das  Madchen,"  also  a  superb 
song;  but  it  is  very  short:  it  is  only  forty- 
three  measures  long,  while  the  "Erlko- 
nig"  is  one  hundred  and  forty-eight 
measures  long.  Moreover,  "Der  Tod 
und  das  Madchen"  is  utterly  simple  in 
structure,  while  the  "Erlkonig"  is  varied 
in  structure  and  rich  in  contrast.  Or, 
take  another  instance:  TheE-major 
Intermezzo,  opus  ii6  (No.  2),  and 
the  Third  Symphony  of  Brahms  are 
both  authentic  masterpieces;  the  first 
is  among  the  most  perfect  of  mod- 
ern piano  works  in  the  smaller  forms, 
178 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

the  second  is  one  of  the  noblest  of 
modern  symphonies;  in  quality  of  inspi- 
ration there  is  nothing  to  choose  between 
them.  Is  the  symphony,  then,  by  reason 
of  superior  bulk,  a  more  eminent  master- 
piece? "There  is  no  perfect  lyric,"  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons  has  finely  and  truly  said 
— and  the  sentence  is  an  answer  to  the 
question  which  has  just  been  asked — 
"there  is  no  perfect  lyric  which  is  made 
less  great  by  the  greatness  of  even  a  per- 
fect drama." 

May  we  not  conclude  that  the 
truth  of  the  matter,  as  we  must  apply 
it  in  Grieg's  case,  is  that  it  is  not  dura-' 
tion  of  inspiration,  but  quality  of  in- 
spiration, which  counts,  and  which  some- 
how must  be  determined  and  appraised. 
Is  Grieg's  accent  the  accent  of  great  mu- 
sic, of  music  of  the  first  class;  has  it  the 
accent,  not  necessarily  of  the  few  supreme 
masters,  but  of  authentic  inspiration? 
Has  it  any  of  the  essential  characteristics 
of  the  best  music?  One  may,  not  too 
179 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

dogmatically,  say  that  these  essential 
characteristics  are:  ideas,  individuality, 
imagination — I  say  nothing  of  "beauty," 
for  that  way  lie  inescapable  pitfalls.  By 
"ideas"  one  means  definite  and  specific 
musical  conceptions  which  persuade  at 
once  by  their  saliency,  their  eloquence, 
their  distinction ;  and  these  concepts  may 
be  melodic,  harmonic  or  rhythmic.  "In- 
dividuality" and  "imagination"  are,  of 
course,  self-explanatory  terms.  To  at- 
tempt to  test  all  music  by  an  application 
of  these  three  touchstones  would  probably 
lead  one,  before  long,  into  a  critical 
quagmire;  but  they  are  of  excellent  serv- 
ice for  purposes  of  rough  classification. 
Let  us  say,  for  example,  that  in  the  music 
of  Tchaikovsky  we  find  extreme  richness 
and  fervour  of  imagination,  vivid  indi- 
viduality, but  not  an  abundance  of  dis- 
tinguished or  noble  ideas;  that  in  the 
music  of  his  brilliant  countryman,  Rim- 
sky-Korsakoff,  we  find  extraordinary  and 
audacious  imagination,  but  little  individ- 
i8o 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

uality  and  few  ideas;  that  in  the  music 
of  Saint-Saens  we  find  neither  imagina- 
tion, important  and  memorable  ideas,  nor 
vital  and  persuasive  individuality  (his 
technical  expertness,  his  admirable  crafts- 
manship, is  a  virtue  which  one  takes  for 
granted  in  a  modern  musician)  ;  that,  to 
pass  to  the  other  extreme,  we  find,  in 
the  music  of  such  men  as  Wagner  and 
Beethoven,  superlative  ideas,  puissant  in- 
dividuality, and  boundless  imagination. 
Now  where,  in  this  category,  does  Grieg 
belong?  With  the  men  whose  supreme 
distinction  lies  in  the  transcendent  quality 
of  their  ideas?  or  with  the  men  of  rest- 
less and  flaming,  or  exquisite,  imagina- 
tion? or  with  the  men  whose  individual- 
ity is  indubitable,  but  who  lack  salient 
and  original  ideas  and  richness  of  imag- 
ination— men  of  the  stamp  of  Mendels- 
sohn, Massenet,  Puccini,  Goldmark? 

Let  us  say  that  Grieg  possesses,  in  a 
measure,  all  of  these  excellences;  but  he 
possesses  them  in  an  unequal  degree.    He 
i8i 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

is  sometimes  truly  imaginative,  as  in  pas- 
sages in  the  "Peer  Gynt"  music,  in  the 
last  two  sonatas  for  violin  and  piano  (opus 
13  and  opus  45),  in  certain  of  the  songs 
and  piano  pieces.  He  has,  too,  achieved 
ideas:  ideas  of  exquisite  distinction,  of 
noble  breadth.  But  they  lack  the  stamp 
of  supreme  excellence;  to  resort  to  a  lit- 
erary analogy,  his  inspiration  never  at- 
tains to  the  kind  of  utter  and  perfect  fe- 
licity which  is  represented,  in  poetic  art, 
by  such  lines  as  these: 

"The  sunrise  blooms  and  withers  on  the  hill 
Like  any  hillflower;  and  the  noblest  troth 
Dies  here  to  dust." 

There  is  music — music  by  Wagner,  by 
Brahms,  by  Debussy — which  is  as  beauti- 
ful, as  supremely  felicitous,  as  these 
lines;  but  Grieg  does  not  command  it. 
He  is  often  captivating  and  delicious, 
eloquent  and  impassioned — as  in  many 
of  his  lovely  songs ;  there  is  free  and  vig- 
orous spontaneity,  an  infectious  vitality, 
182 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

in  the  violin  sonatas;  in  the  dirge  from 
the  "Peer  Gynt"  suite  the  music  has  a 
quality  of  sadness  and  beauty  which  none 
save  Grieg  could  have  given  it.  To 
praise  such  things  as  these  is  as  neces- 
sary as  it  is  delightful.  Yet  it  would  be 
over-generous  to  say  that  they  belong 
among  the  class  of  the  very  best,  delect- 
able and  striking  as  they  are. 

But,  in  a  surpassing  degree,  Grieg  has 
individuality — individuality  that  is  seiz- 
ing and  indubitable.  That,  one  feels,  is 
his  distinguishing  possession.  His  ac- 
cent is  unmistakable.  His  speech  may 
sway  one,  or  it  may  not;  but  always  the 
voice  is  the  voice  of  Grieg.  You  recog- 
nise it  at  once;  there  is  no  mistaking  it. 
He  has,  beyond  denial,  his  own  distin- 
guishing way  of  saying  things,  his  own 
idioms — his  own  mannerisms,  if  you  will. 
You  hear  a  phrase  from  one  of  the  lesser 
known  sonatas  for  violin  and  piano,  and 
you  exclaim  at  once:  "Grieg  1"  For  the 
183 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

music  is  as  redolent  of  him,  and  of  none 
other,  as 

"O  cloud-pale  eyelids,  dream-dimmed  eyes.  .  ." 

is  redolent  of  Mr.  Yeats,  or  as  the  re- 
corded vision: 

"Fair  as  in  the  flesh  she  swims  to  me  on  tears" 

is  redolent  of  Mr.  Meredith.  The  mu- 
sic of  Grieg,  when  he  is  at  his  best,  is 
drenched  in  persohality,  in  individual 
colour.  It  is  curiously  his  own,  curiously 
free  from  the  reflection  of  other  minds 
and  other  temperaments.  In  its  earlier 
condition  it  reminds  one  at  times  of 
Chopin,  of  Schumann,  of  Mendelssohn, 
occasionally  of  Wagner;  in  its  later  stages 
it  suggests  no  one  but  Grieg  himself. 
Then,  at  such  times,  it  is  a  rare  voice  that 
speaks,  a  voice  of  penetrating  sweetness, 
a  tender  and  vibrant  voice,  a  voice  of  in- 
comparable freshness  and  limpidity — no 
184 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

music-maker  since  Schubert  has  uttered 
tones  so  liquid  and  free,  so  spontaneous, 
unwearied  and  unworn.  There  have  been 
Qthers  who  spoke  more  entrancingly, 
more  profoundly,  more  nobly,  more 
subtly,  with  more  importunate  and  com- 
manding beauty;  there  are  to-day,  among 
those  who  but  a  short  while  ago  were 
Grieg's  contemporaries,  music-makers 
who  surpass  this  delectable  lyrist  in  scope 
and  vigour  of  imagination  and  fineness  of 
thought.  Yet  Grieg  is  thrice-admirable 
in  this :  he  wears  no  one's  mantle ;  he  bor- 
rows no  man's  speech.    ^ 


185 


VII 
A   MUSICAL   COSMOPOLITE 


A    MUSICAL   COSMOPOLITE 

It  is  probably  not  realised  by  most  mu- 
sic-lovers that,  of  the  four  or  five  living 
composers  whose  productions  are  indis- 
putably important,  one  is  a  resident  of 
the  United  States — a  circumstance,  it  will 
perhaps  be  conceded,  of  more  conse- 
quence to  the  future  of  musical  art  in 
this  country  than  the  fact  that  the  com- 
poser who  is  meant  was  born,  not  in 
America,  but  in  Alsace. 

The  ordinary  composer,  the  composer 
as  a  type,  is  avid  of  publicity.  It  is  the 
breath  of  his  nostrils:  without  it,  ad- 
vancement, prosperity,  success,  are  to  him 
well-nigh  inconceivable.  He  would  dis- 
miss as  meaningless  and  absurd  the  lines 
of  the  poets  of  "Vagabondia": 

"Success   is   in   the   silences, 
Though  fame  be  in  the  song." 
189 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Charles  Martin  Loeffler  is  a  composer 
who  is  egregiously  false  to  type.  His 
indifference  to  publicity,  to  the  promo- 
tion of  his  reputation,  is  extravagant. 
Whether  his  music  be  known  or  un- 
known, liked  or  misliked,  praised  or  dis- 
paraged, is,  to  him,  apparently  a  matter 
of  very  little  moment.  He  has  been  slow 
to  complete,  reluctant  to  give  forth.  The 
earliest  of  the  pieces  which  he  has  seen 
fit  to  retain  in  the  list  of  his  works  date 
back  almost  a  quarter  of  a  century;  yet 
there  are  to-day  less  than  half  a  hun- 
dred compositions  which  he  cares  to 
acknowledge;  he  has  discarded  almost  as 
much  as  he  has  retained.  And,  as  I  have 
said,  he  has  been  loath  to  yield  his  manu- 
scripts to  the  engraver.  Of  the  forty-odd 
separate  compositions  which  to-day  rep- 
resent his  avowed  production  only  one- 
half  have  as  yet  been  published. 

Thus  it  is  almost  in  despite  of  himself 
that  Loeffler  has  achieved  the  celebrity 
that  is  his.     It  is  celebrity  of  an  enviable 
190 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

kind,  for  he  is  known  chiefly  among  those 
who  relish  the  finest  and  rarest  that  is 
done  or  attempted  in  the  musical  art  of 
our  time.  In  other  words,  he  is  most 
truly  valued  by  epicures  and  connois- 
seurs; and  that,  assuredly,  is  a  desirable 
and  fortunate  relation  to  bear  to  one's 
contemporary  public. 

Loeffler,  though  he  was  born  at  Miihl- 
hausen,  Alsace,  in  1861,  has  lived  and 
laboured  in  America  for  a  generation  as 
composer  and  violinist.  His  training  as 
a  music-maker  was  cosmopolitan;  he 
studied  his  art  in  Berlin  and  in  Paris, 
but  his  temperamental  and  intellectual 
sympathies  have  drawn  him  persistently 
toward  France.  Indeed,  he  might  at  one 
period  of  his  career  have  been  taken  by 
the  casual  observer  for  a  Frenchman  pur 
sang.  Almost  all  of  the  music  which  he 
composed  between  the  years  1895  and 
1901  was  suggested  by  French  texts;  and 
in  his  "Quatre  Melodies,"  one  of  the 
works  of  that  period,  even  the  dedications 
191 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

are  in  French.  His  prepossessions  are  to- 
day less  inalienably  Gallic ;  but  he  still  re- 
mains essentially  a  cosmopolite,  though 
I  believe  he  has  been  for  some  time  a 
naturalised  citizen  of  the  United  States. 

Not  long  after  he  came  to  America,  as 
^a  youth  just  entering  his  twenties,  he 
joined  the  Boston  Symphony  Orchestra 
as  one  of  the  violins,  and  he  served  for 
many  years  as  second  concert-master  in 
that  illustrious  organization.  He  retired 
from  the  orchestra  in  1903;  and  now,  on 
his  farm  near  Medfield,  Massachusetts, 
devotes  himself  for  the  most  part  to  com- 
position. 

His  works  include  orchestral  and 
choral  pieces,  chamber  music  and  songs. 
Though  his  knowledge  of  the  resources 
of  the  piano  is  comprehensive,  and 
though  he  writes  for  it  with  extraor- 
dinary skill  in  conjunction  with  the  voice 
and  with  other  instruments,  he  has  con- 
tributed nothing  to  its  solo  repertoire. 
For  orchestra  he  has  composed  four  tone- 
192 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

poems:  "La  Mort  de  Tintagiles"  (after 
Maeterlinck),  *'La  Bonne  Chanson"  (af- 
ter Verlaine),  ''La  Villanelle  du  Diable" 
(after  Maurice  Rollinat),  and  "A  Pagan 
Poem"  (after  Virgil).  His  chamber 
music  includes  a  quintet  in  one  move- 
ment for  three  violins,  viola  and  'cello; 
an  octet  for  two  violins,  viola,  'cello, 
double  bass,  two  clarinets  and  harp;  two 
rhapsodies  for  oboe,  viola  and  piano ;  and 
a  sextet  in  one  movement  for  two  violins, 
two  violas,  two  'cellos,  entitled  "Le  Pas- 
seur  d'Eau."  His  songs  comprise 
''Quatre  Poemes,"  for  voice,  viola  and 
piano:  "La  Cloche  Felee"  (Baudelaire), 
"Dansons  la  Gigue!"  "Le  son  du  cor 
s'afflige  vers  les  bois,"  "Serenade"  (Ver- 
laine) ;  "Quatre  Melodies":  "Timbres 
Oublies,"  "Adieu  pour  Jamais,"  "Les 
Soirs  d'Automne,"  "Les  Paons"  (all  to 
words  by  Gustave  Kahn)  ;  "Four 
Poems":  "Sudden  Light"  (Rossetti), 
"Sonnet"  (George  Cabot  Lodge),  "A 
Dream  within  a  Dream,"  "To  Helen" 
193 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

(Poe)  ;  "The  Wind  among  the  Reeds": 
'The  Hosting  of  the  Sidhe,"  "The  Host 
of  the  Air"  (both  to  words  by  W.  B. 
Yeats)  ;  "Le  Flambeau  Vivant"  (Baude- 
laire) ;  "Vereinsamt"  (Nietzsche)  ;  "Der 
Kehraus"  (Eichendorf)  ;  "Ton  Souvenir 
est  comme  un  livre  bien  aime"  (Albert 
Samain)  ;  and  settings,  as  yet  untitled,  of 
two  poems  from  Vol.  I  of  Gustave 
Kahn's  "Poesies."  "By  the  Rivers  of 
Babylon"  is  a  setting  of  portions  of  the 
126th  and  137th  Psalms  for  women's 
chorus,  organ,  harp,  two  flutes  and  'cello; 
"L'Archet,"  text  by  Cros,  is  a  ballad  for 
mezzo-soprano,  female  chorus,  piano  and 
viola;  there  is  an  eight-part  chorus  for 
mixed  voices  a  cappella,  "For  One  Who 
Fell  in  Battle,"  to  words  by  T.  W.  Par- 
sons; there  is  a  setting  of  "The  Ser- 
mon on  the  Mount"  for  chorus,  organ 
and  strings;  and  a  one-act  opera,  based 
upon  a  play  by  William  Sharp,  is  in 
process  of  completion.  In  addition  to 
these,  there  are  a  number  of  works  of 
194 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

early  date  which  do  not  now  satisfy  the 
composer  and  which  he  does  not  intend  to 
publish.  Among  these  are  a  string  quar- 
tet in  A  minor,  a  "Divertimento"  in  the 
same  key  for  violin  and  orchestra,  a  "Fan- 
tastic Concerto"  for  'cello  and  orchestra, 
a  suite,  "Les  Veillees  de  I'Ukraine"  (after 
Gogol),  for  orchestra  and  violin,  a  "Di- 
vertissement Espagnol"  for  orchestra  and 
saxophone,  a  "Ballade  Carnavalesque" 
for  piano,  flute,  oboe,  saxophone  and  bas- 
soon, a  setting  for  voice  and  piano  of 
Baudelaire's  "Harmonic  du  Soir,"  and  a 
string  sextet  in  three  movements,  the  mid- 
dle one  of  which,  revised,  is  the  "Pas- 
seur  d'Eau"  referred  to  above.* 

*  Although  virtually  all  of  these  works  have  been 
performed,  only  one-half  of  them,  as  I  have  already 
observed,  have  been  committed  by  their  meticulous 
author  to  the  printed  page.  In  1903  the  "Quatre 
Melodies"  were  published  as  opus  10.  The 
"Quatre  Poemes"  (opus  5)  followed  in  1904.  To 
the  following  year  belong  the  rhapsodies  for  oboe, 
viola,  and  piano  (without  opus  number),  "La  Mort 
de  Tintagiles"    (opus  6),   and   "La  Villanelle  du 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Loeffler's  artistic  terrain  is  not  easily 
defined  with  exactitude.  The  literary  in- 
clinations of  a  modern  composer  are 
usually  a  trustworthy  guide  to  his  tem- 
perament, to  the  colour  of  his  thought, 
to  his  principia.  But  Loeffler's  tastes 
range  over  a  somewhat  perplexingly  wide 
and  diversified  territory.  He  has  been 
moved  to  musical  utterance  by  Poe  and 
by  Virgil,  by  Maeterlinck  and  by  Nietz- 
sche; he  apprehends  Baudelaire,  Rolli- 
nat,  Rossetti,  Verlaine;  he  is  an  inquisi- 
tive delver  in  the  literature  and  philos- 
ophy of  alien  peoples  and  forgotten  civil- 
isations; his  intellectual  curiosity  is  in- 
satiable. Yet,  on  the  whole,  he  has  been 
most  strongly  disposed  toward  the  liter- 

Diable"  (opus  9).  The  "Four  Poems"  (opus  15) 
were  issued  in  1906,  "By  the  Rivers  of  Babylon" 
(opus  3)  in  1907,  "The  Wind  Among  the  Reeds" 
(without  opus  number)  in  1908,  "A  Pagan  Poem" 
(opus  14)  in  1909,  and  "For  One  who  Fell  in 
Battle"  in  191 1.  That,  up  to  the  present  time,  is 
the  whole  of  his  published  output. 
196 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

ary  revokes,  the  mystics  and  visionaries, 
of  our  own  time;  he  has  manifested  a 
natural  kinship  of  thought  and  feeling 
with  Verlaine,  with  Baudelaire,  with 
Rollinat,  with  Gustave  Kahn,  with  Maet- 
erlinck, with  Poe.  He  is  far  from  being 
a  mere  recrudescent  Romanticist.  He 
has  a  love  for  the  macabre,  the  fantas- 
tically sinister  and  tragical;  but  he  in- 
dulges it  in  a  manner  wholly  free  from 
the  excess  and  the  attitudinising  that  are 
an  unmistakable  index  of  the  survival  of 
the  Romanticistic  impulse.  His  sincerity 
and  his  instinct  for  proportion  are  con- 
stant and  unfailing.  He  can  set  to  music 
the  poignant  and  terrible  "Cloche 
Felee"  of  Baudelaire,  and  the  music  is  a 
perfect  reflex  of  the  poem;  yet  it  is  im- 
possible not  to  feel  that  it  was  written 
by  one  whose  soul  is  very  different  from 
the  soul  of  Baudelaire  as  exposed  to  us 
by  Mr.  James  Huneker:  a  soul  "patient- 
ly built  up  as  a  fabulous  bird  might  build 
its  nest — cascades  of  black  stars,  rags, 
197 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

leaves,  rotten  wood,  corroding  dreams, 
a  spray  of  roses,  arabesques  of  incense 
and  verdigris.  .  .  ."  Even  when  Loeffler 
is  most  eloquently  sinister,  most  disquiet- 
ingly  baleful,  a  rare  tact,  an  unerring 
sense  of  measure  and  balance,  a  prophy- 
lactic humour,  save  him  from  extrava- 
gance and  turgidity.  His  music  permits 
us  to  ascribe  to  him  a  soul  which  could 
approximate  the  soul  of  Baudelaire  at 
only  a  few  points.  He  is  capable  of  mak- 
ing us  dream  of  black  stars,  and  at  times 
there  is  gall  and  wormwood  in  his  mu- 
sic; but  there  is  no  decay  and  no  squalor 
in  it.  With  all  his  passion  for  the  bizarre 
and  the  umbrageous  and  the  grotesque, 
we  are  never  in  doubt  as  to  the  essential 
dignity,  the  essential  purity  and  nobility, 
of  his  spirit:  he  is  one  of  the  dmes  bien 
nees. 

Au  fond  he  is  a  mystic,  a  dreamer,  a 
visionary.    A  mystic:  for  Loeffler  has  the 
mystic's    bias    toward    that   which  tran- 
scends  the  immediate  and  the  tangible 
198 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

phases  of  experience,  the  mystic's  serene 
conviction  of  the  reality  of  the  extra-sen- 
sational. His  imagination  ranges  most 
freely  and  familiarly  in  that  psychic  bor- 
derland where  the  emotions  become  in- 
describably rarefied  and  subtly  height- 
ened— where  they  become  more  the  echo 
and  reverberation  of  emotions  than  emo- 
tions themselves,  yet  gain  rather  than  lose 
in  intensity  by  the  process.  He  is  of 
the  order  of  mystics  whose  thought, 
while  it  has  the  penetrative  power  of  all 
mystical  thought,  is  saturated  with  a 
quality  of  feeling  that  springs  from  an 
exquisite  and  supersensitive  intuition  of 
the  human  heart,  rather  than  from  sus- 
tained spiritual  aspiration.  That  is  to 
say,  he  is  akin  to  Rossetti  and  Yeats  and 
Maeterlinck  rather  than  to  Crashaw  and 
Blake  and  Wordsworth. 

Necessarily,  therefore,    he    is    both    a 
visionary    and    a    dreamer — a   visionary 
whose  thought  is  predominantly  sombre 
and  tragical;  a  dreamer  oppressed  by 
199 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"...  the  burden  of  the  mystery  .  ,  , 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world." 

His  most  characteristic  music  is  that  to 
which  he  has  been  moved  by  the  imagin- 
ings of  Verlaine,  Rollinat,  Poe,  Maeter- 
linck, Baudelaire,  in  their  autumnal 
moods,  their  disconsolate  hours.  He  has 
seemed  to  be  most  congenially  employed, 
as  he  has  been  most  persistently  engaged, 
in  giving  musical  voice  to  thoughts  of 
which  he  is  reminded  by  the  darker 
brooding  of  these  masters  of  sorrowful 
speech.  He  is  shaken  by  the  unutterable 
sadness  of  human  life,  by  the  thought  of 
"the  great  stream  of  human  tears  falling 
always  through  the  shadows  of  the 
world":  the  lacrymce  rerum  obsess  his 
imagination,  and  he  speaks  his  dolour 
again  and  again,  in  accents  that  are  by 
turns  mournful,  anguished,  despairing, 
and  resigned.  His  music  is  touched  at 
its  core  with  an  ineffable  melancholy.  It 
200 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

is  most  typical  when  it  issues  from  his 
imagination  in  slow 

"...  swallow-flights   of    song    that    dip 
Their  wings  in  tears.  .  .  ." 

He  is  at  ease,  not  in  Zion,  but  in  the  com- 
pany of  those  who,  grief-haunted  and  dis- 
illusioned, face  the  human  pageant  with 
the  despair  that  cloaks  itself  in  irony  and 
bitterness.  He  is  giving  the  truest  ac- 
count of  his  temperament  when  he  is 
translating  into  music  some  of  the  more 
grievous  and  sinister  imaginings  of  RoUi- 
nat,  or  some  poem  by  Verlaine  or  Baude- 
laire filled  with  brooding  menace  and 
immitigable  grief;  or  in  his  symphonic 
poem  suggested  by  that  most  piteous  and 
terrible  of  Maeterlinck's  plays,  "La  Mort 
de  Tintagiles";  or,  as  in  one  of  his  latest 
songs,  when  he  is  setting  wild  and  maca- 
bre verses  by  Eichendorf. 

It  is  true  that  he  has  responded  to  other 
emotional  states.  He  has  derived  an  or- 
chestral song  of  rapturous  lyric  sweetness 

201 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

from  the  aubade  which  Verlaine  ad- 
dressed to  his  betrothed.  The  music  that 
he  wrote  for  Poe's  "To  Helen"  is  of  a 
loveliness  that  might  well  fit  it  to  serve 
as  an  apostrophe  in  illustration  of  the 
matchless  lines  of  Wordsworth: 

"...  and  beauty  born  of  murmuring  sound 
Shall  pass  into  her  face." 

His  magnificent  "Pagan  Poem,"  pro- 
voked by  the  amorous  incantation  of  the 
sorceress  in  Virgil's  eighth  eclogue,  is 
largely  and  nobly  rhapsodic.  His  a  cap- 
pella  chorus,  "For  One  Who  Fell  in  Bat- 
tle," exhales  a  spirit  of  grief  that  is  all 
transfiguring  and  uplifted  tenderness 
rather  than  piercing  and  inconsolable  re- 
gret. Latterly  he  dwelt  for  a  time  in  II- 
dathach,  the  Many-coloured  Land  of  the 
Celtic  imagination,  bringing  forth  some 
music — haunting,  fantastic,  of  insinuat- 
ing charm — derived  from  poems  by  the 
Irishman  Yeats.  He  has,  too,  repeatedly 
given  evidence  of  the  fact  that  the  ritual 

202 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

of  the  Church  has  exerted  a  powerful 
effect  upon  his  imagination.  But  he  re- 
turns ever  and  again  to  the  contempla- 
tion of  those  darker  moods  of  the  soul 
which  seem  chiefly  to  stimulate  his  in- 
spiration, and  which  compel  his  distin- 
guishing performances  as  a  music-maker. 
It  is  beyond  dispute  that  the  general 
aspect  of  his  art  is  not  eupeptic.  He 
makes  us  feel  as  if  he  had  consecrated 
himself  to  what  Goethe  called  "the  wor- 
ship of  sorrow" ;  or  we  seem  to  hear  him 
repeating  the  plaint  of  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  that  "the  whole  creation  is  a 
mystery  ...  a  dream  or  mock  show,  and 
we  all  therein  but  pantaloons  and 
antics";  or  we  think  of  Leopardi  and  his 
insistence  upon  the  indegno  mistero  delle 
cose;  and  at  times  we  hear  the  very  voice 
of  Senancour:  "Sensibility  which  no 
words  can  express,  charm  and  torment 
of  our  vain  years!  vast  consciousness  of 
a  nature  everywhere  greater  than  we  are, 
and  everywhere  impenetrable!"  He 
203 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

sounds  this  note  again  and  again.  It 
recurs  insistently,  a  sombre  undertone  in 
his  music,  like  the  Dies  Irae  whose  char- 
acteristic progressions  he  introduces  so 
often  into  the  thematic  structure  of  his 
pieces. 

"Nothing  is  lost  that's  wrought  with 
tears,"  said  Blake;  and  since  every  per- 
sonal revelation  of  life  through  art,  so 
long  as  it  be  authentic  and  communica- 
tive, is  infinitely  precious,  there  can  be 
no  question  of  the  value  of  such  disclos- 
ures of  temperament  and  experience  as 
we  get  from  LoefHer  at  his  most  typical. 
Certainly  nothing  could  exceed  the  sin- 
cerity and  the  affecting  eloquence  of  his 
art  in  whatever  aspect  he  chooses  to  ex- 
hibit it;  and  he  is  never  more  sincere  or 
more  eloquent  than  when  he  gives  sor- 
rowful and  responsive  heed  to 

"Earth's   old    and   weary   cry." 

Of  the  beauty  and  the  importance  of  his 

music,  qua  music,  there  will,  in  time,  be 

204 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

no  denial  worth  considering.  After  a 
quarter-century  of  curiously  deliberate 
activity,  of  quiet  devotion  to  what  would 
have  seemed  to  many  an  impossible  ideal 
of  perfection,  he  is  at  last  coming  into 
his  own.  He  is  recognised,  among  those 
whose  sense  of  the  best  is  surest,  as  one 
of  that  small  group  of  living  composers, 
to  whom  I  referred  at  the  start,  whose 
deliverances  are  of  prime  artistic  conse- 
quence. He  shares  with  Strauss,  with 
Debussy,  with  d'lndy,  the  distinction  of 
pre-eminence  over  the  lesser  and  vary- 
ingly  admirable  body  of  contemporary 
music-makers. 

His  artistic  growth  has  been  marked 
by  eclecticism.  His  cosmopolitan  train- 
ing, his  long  years  of  orchestral  service 
as  an  executant  of  other  men's  ideas,  and 
an  inexhaustible  curiosity  in  all  esthetic 
and  intellectual  matters,  have  had  their 
natural  influence  upon  his  music.  He 
has  absorbed  a  dozen  musical  tempera- 
ments, has  known  and  betrayed  their  in- 
205 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

fluence,  has  exhausted  their  power  of 
stimulus,  and  has  forgotten  them;  his 
own  individuality  has  survived.  It  is 
possible  to  discern  in  his  earlier  work  the 
impression  made  upon  his  sensitive 
psychic  retina  by  Bach,  by  Wagner,  by 
Berlioz,  by  Liszt,  by  Brahms;  but  he  has 
finally  wrought  a  style  that  is  unmistak- 
able and  his  own.  There  are  pregnant 
moments,  remarkable  and  original  beau- 
ties, in  his  earlier  work;  but  his  speech 
has  been  wholly  personal  only  in  the  mu- 
sic which  he  has  produced  within  the 
last  fifteen  years.  His  ''Quatre  Poemes," 
which  were  composed  a  decade  and  a  half 
ago, — though  they  were  not  published 
until  1904, — expose  clearly  his  typical 
traits.  His  harmonic  and  melodic  style, 
the  full  flavour  of  his  personality,  may 
here  be  savoured  for  the  first  time.  He 
has  written  nothing  more  completely 
characteristic  than  the  second  and  third 
pages  of  "La  Cloche  Felee,"  the  third 
and  eighth  pages  of  the  "Serenade"  (the 
206 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

setting  of  the  line,  "Et  ta  douceur  a  me 
martyriser"  is  incomparable),  the  open- 
ing page  of  "Le  son  du  Cor,"  and,  in 
Dansons  la  Giguel"  the  setting  of 

"Je  me  souvlens,  je  me  souviens, 
Des  heures  et  des  entretiens, 
Et  c'est  le  meilleur  de  mes  biens." 

It  will  be  perceived  by  any  receptive 
observer  who  examines  or  hears  these 
songs  that  this  is  music  quite  solitary  and 
apart,  music  which  says  new  things  in  a 
peculiarly  distinguished  way. 

His  harmony  is  irrubrical,  and  it  is 
highly  individualised.  It  does  not  mani- 
fest Strauss's  incorrigible  audacity  of  pro- 
cedure, his  Olympian  disdain  of  eu- 
phony; and  in  comparison  with  the  ob- 
liquities of  such  nefast  revolutionaries 
as  Schonberg,  Stravinsky,  et  aL,  it  seems 
almost  old-fashioned.  It  is  less  fluid 
and  prismatic  than  Debussy's,  a  good 
deal  less  acrid  than  d'Indy's.  He 
uses  freely  effects  derived  from  the  eccle- 
207 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

siastical  modes,  though  their  influence 
upon  him  has  not  been  so  profound  and 
continuous  as  it  has  been  upon  Debussy. 
His  harmonic  method  is  clearly  the 
product  of  an  exceptional  feeling  for  rich 
and  subtle  combinations  of  tone,  balanced 
by  an  instinctive  reticence,  a  sense  of 
form  and  balance,  for  which  "classic"  is 
the  just  word.  And  the  note  of  his  style 
as  a  harmonist  is  unmistakable.  Such 
passages  as  his  setting  of  "Et  ta  douceur 
a  me  martyriser,"  in  the  "Serenade"  (to 
which  I  have  already  referred),  the  last 
page  of  "Les  Paons,"  the  final  measures 
of  "To  Helen,"  the  first  six  measures, 
and  the  last  page,  of  the  "Sonnet,"  and 
those  portions  of  "La  Mort  de  Tinta- 
giles"  in  which  the  viola  d'amore  partici- 
pates, could  have  come  from  no  other 
hand  but  Loeffler's. 

I  have  instanced  these  passages  chiefly 

because  of  the  striking  and  individual 

quality  of  the  harmonic  idea  underlying 

them.    But,  notable  harmonist  though  he 

208 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

is,  as  a  melodist  Loeffler  is  still  more  re- 
markable. I  am  aware  of  no  living  melo- 
dist who  combines,  in  equal  measure, 
these  qualities:  on  the  positive  side,  origi- 
nality of  conception,  an  incorruptible 
fineness  of  taste,  and  the  mastery  of  a  style 
at  once  broad  and  subtle,  passionate  and 
restrained;  on  the  negative  side,  a  spon- 
taneous avoidance  of  sentimentalism,  triv- 
iality, and  commonplace.  They  are  not 
possessed  in  like  degree  by  any  one  of 
his  contemporaries.  Strauss's  frequent 
commonness,  d'lndy's  limited  emotional 
compass,  Faure's  slightness  of  substance, 
Reger's  aridity,  rank  them,  as  melodists, 
definitely  below  Loeffler;  while  Saint- 
Saens  and  Sibelius,  Dukas  and  Ravel  and 
Schonberg,  Elgar  and  Rachmaninoff  and 
Scriabine,  are  his  inferiors  at  almost 
every  point.  As  for  Debussy,  he  is  in- 
deed an  exquisite  melodist,  a  creator  of 
melodic  thoughts  that  are  incomparably 
lovely  and  of  an  unexampled  rarity — 
thoughts  that  are  as 
209 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"dreams  of  the  wavering  images  of  dreams." 

But  Debussy  has  not  Loeffler's  blend  of 
subtlety  and  power,  of  largeness  and  in- 
tensity. He  has  written  nothing  so  broad 
and  fervent,  so  passionate  and  full- 
throated,  as  the  superb  theme  in  A  flat 
which  is  heard  from  the  violins  in  the 
poco  piu  mosso  section  near  the  begin- 
ning of  the  "Pagan  Poem" ;  or  the  equally 
superb  melody  in  A  minor,  sung  by  the 
'cellos  and  violas  against  arpeggios  for 
the  piano,  which  follows  the  first  dis- 
tant call  of  the  trumpets  behind  the 
scene.  In  fact,  the  whole  of  this  extraor- 
dinary score  is  pressed  down  and  over- 
flowing with  melodic  ideas  of  enthrall- 
ing eloquence  and  beauty — melodically 
considered,  it  is  a  masterwork  of  the  first 
order.  Examine  also  (to  adduce  at  ran- 
dom) his  song,  "Les  Paons."  I  know  of 
few  more  ravishing  examples  of  pure 
lyric  inspiration  than  the  setting  which 
he  has  given  to  the  words, 

210 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

"Nuit  claire  aux  ramures  d'accords, 
Et  la  lassitude  a  berce  son  corps 
Au  rythme  odorant  des  pures  musiques." 

Consider,  again,  the  song,  "To  Helen," 
which  is  a  continuous  fabric  of  melodic 
inspiration  (how  inevitable  and  how 
splendid  is  the  expression  which  the  com- 
poser has  found  for  "the  glory  that  was 
Greece  and  the  grandeur  that  was 
Rome"!).  These  are  typical,  not  iso- 
lated, instances  of  his  melodic  power. 
As  with  his  harmonic  style,  his  mel- 
ody is  unmistakable  in  its  accent. 
It  is  impossible  to  think  of  the  pas- 
sages which  I  have  cited  as  issu- 
ing from  any  brain  but  Loeffler's;  or 
to  ascribe  to  any  other  writer  of  music, 
living  or  dead,  such  equally  typical 
things  as  the  phrase  marked  "espressivo" 
in  the  piano  part  of  "La  Cloche  Felee" 
just  before  the  words  "Qui,  malgre  sa 
vieillesse" ;  or  the  exceedingly  character- 
istic melody  in  A  major  for  the  piano  on 
the  third  page  of  "Adieu  pour  Jamais"; 

211 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

or  the  haunting  phrase  in  triplets  {an- 
dante,  12-8)  which  begins  the  second 
page  of  "La  Cornemuse";  or  the  woful 
melody  which  opens  "Le  son  du  Cor" ;  or 
the  chief  themes  of  "La  Mort  de  Tin- 
tagiles."  If  these  are  not  the  product  of 
an  inventive  and  imaginative  capacity 
of  the  first  order,  it  is  puzzling  to  know 
what  the  signs  of  that  capacity  may  be. 

His  individual  employment  of  har- 
mony, his  excelling  gift  as  a  melodist,  are 
supported  by  a  technic  that  is  secure 
and  resourceful,  and,  in  its  mature  de- 
velopment, masterful.  He  controls  his 
medium  with  ease,  whether  he  is  writing 
for  piano,  for  the  voice,  or  for  orchestra. 
He  is  a  daring  and  felicitous  contrapun- 
talist,  a  fertile  contriver  of  rhythms ;  and 
as  a  painter  upon  the  orchestral  canvas 
he  has  a  manner  and  a  power  that  are 
his  alone.  He  does  not  score  with  the 
witchery  of  the  necromantic  Debussy, 
nor  with  the  overwhelming  weight 
and  plangency  of  Strauss;  but  he 
212 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

has  discovered  hues  and  perspectives  that 
are  unknown  to  them.  He  employs  a 
palette  that  can  yield  the  barbaric  splen- 
dours of  the  "Pagan  Poem,"  the  pure 
radiance  of  the  morning-song  after  Ver- 
laine,  the  sombre  shadows  that  enwrap 
the  tragedy  of  Tintagiles  and  the  Dread 
Queen. 

Always,  in  every  exercise  of  his  art, 
he  displays  a  fineness,  a  scrupulousness, 
an  exigent  passion  for  perfection,  that  are 
unparalleled  in  the  musical  art  of  to-day. 
He  has  a  more  thoroughgoing  detesta- 
tion of  the  facile,  the  obvious,  the  inex- 
pensive, than  even  the  fastidious  De- 
bussy— I  think  he  would  be  incapable  of 
certain  Massenet-like  sentimentalities  to 
which  that  singular  genius  seems  to  be 
prone  now  and  again.  It  is  not  easy  to 
imagine  music  more  utterly  free  from  the 
note  of  platitude  and  Philistinism,  or 
from  deliberate  concessions  of  any  sort, 
than  the  music  of  Loeffler.  He  never  em- 
ploys those  convenient  aesthetic  moulds 
213 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

which,  as  Henry  James  has  said,  "con- 
demn us  to  an  eternal  repetition  of  a  few 
familiar  cliches."  His  ideas  are  as  fresh 
and  unformularised  as  they  are  fine  and 
sincere. 

I  have  named  Debussy  in  the  course  of 
certain  contrasts  and  comparisons.  A 
good  deal  has  been  made,  by  critics  who 
are  either  undiscerning  or  incompetent, 
of  an  alleged  indebtedness  to  Debussy  on 
the  part  of  Loeffler.  It  is  true  that  Loef- 
fler's  music  has  certain  external  traits 
which  it  shares  with  the  music  of  De- 
bussy, of  d'Indy,  of  Faure,  and  of  other 
musicians  native  to  the  country  with 
which,  in  a  spiritual  sense,  Loeffler  is 
allied.  These  men  use  in  common 
various  harmonic  and  melodic  expedients 
which,  superficially,  relate  them,  but 
which  no  more  indicate  an  essential  kin- 
ship than  did,  for  example,  the  use  of  cer- 
tain chromatic  progressions  by  Liszt  and 
Wagner  indicate  the  interdependence  of 
those  two  masters — Wagner's  obvious  and 
214 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

unashamed  thematic  borrowings  from 
his  long-suffering  friend  are  another  mat- 
ter. The  important  fact,  in  the  case  of 
Loeffler  and  Debussy,  is  that  their  habit 
of  thought  and  their  manner  of  utterance 
are  fundamentally  different.  Their  na- 
tures impinge  at  a  few  points;  they  are 
both  dreamers,  both  visionaries,  and  they 
both  have  the  mystical  temper;  but  in 
their  intellectual  outlook,  in  their  spirit- 
ual and  emotional  preoccupations,  they 
differ  toto  ccbIo.  It  is  as  impossible  to 
think  of  Debussy  as  the  composer  of  "La 
Mort  de  Tintagiles,"  the  "Pagan  Poem," 
"La  Clothe  Felee,"  or  "To  Helen,"  as 
it  is  to  think  of  Loeffler  as  the  composer 
of  "Poissons  d'Or,"  or  "Nuages,"  or 
"Sirenes,"  or  "L'Apres-midi  d'un 
Faune."  Their  temperaments  and  their 
styles  are  irreconcilable.  It  is  this  ele- 
mentary and  indisputable  fact  which 
makes  the  suggestion  of  an  obligation  on 
Loeffler's  part  unworthy  and  inconsider- 
able. 

215 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

In  the  case  of  so  complex,  various,  and 
restless  a  spirit  as  Loeffler's — one  which 
is  fed  by  many  obscure  and  mysterious 
streams  of  consciousness — all  generalisa- 
tions should  be  tentatively  held  and  ad- 
vanced. I  think,  though,  that  I  may  say 
of  him  that  his  distinguishing  character- 
istic, certainly  his  distinguishing  achieve- 
ment, is  his  consummate  mastery  of  sor- 
rowful speech.  His  creative  gift  flowers 
most  perfectly  when  he  is  voicing  moods 
of  grief  and  lamentation.  I  think  that 
he  is  then  not  only  most  truly  and  mov- 
ingly himself,  but  that  in  this — in  his 
power  of  expressing  a  peculiar  and  dis- 
tinctive quality  of  sadness:  a  sadness 
burdened  with  wondering  despair  and 
haunted  by  a  sense  of  mystery  and  terror 
— he  is  unequalled.  This  peculiar  tris- 
tesse  underlies  his  art  in  almost  all  of  its 
manifestations.  It  finds  voice  in  the 
finale  of  the  "Divertimento"  for  violin 
and  orchestra;  it  wails  in  the  grievous 
tune  imputed  to  the  lamenting  bagpipe- 
216 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

player  who,  in  "La  Cornemuse,"  is  heard 
"near  the  crossroads  of  the  crucifix";  it 
pervades  his  inexpressibily  doleful  pic- 
ture of  the  lonely,  marsh-bordered  pool 
under  ominous  skies;  it  sings  in  the  sweet 
and  plaintive  voice  of  the  doomed  child 
Tintagiles;  it  is  sardonic,  embittered,  and 
terrible  in  the  "Villanelle  du  Diable''; 
wild  and  reckless,  or  tragically  gay,  in  the 
"Serenade"  and  "Dansons  la  Gigue";  un- 
utterably mournful  in  "Le  son  du  Cor"; 
passionately  rebellious  in  his  song  "Ver- 
einsamt."  This  enduring  melancholy  is, 
moreover,  peculiar  to  himself.  It  is  a 
very  different  thing  from  the  lucid  pathos 
that  speaks  from  certain  songs  of  Schu- 
bert; from  the  uneasy  and  passionate 
brooding  of  Chopin;  from  the  heart- 
shaking  sorrow  that  fills  up  the  third  act 
of  Wagner's  "Tristan";  from  the  wistful 
self-communing  of  Schumann;  from  the 
black  despair  that  tortured  the  soul  of 
Tchaikovsky;  from  the  tender  and  ele- 
giacal  regret  which  in  Edward  Mac- 
217 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

Dowell  finds  a  matchless  declaration; 
from  the  passive,  almost  inarticulate  sor- 
row, the  "dim  sadness"  (in  Milton's 
phrase) ,  that  inhabits  certain  wonderful 
pages  of  Debussy's  "Pelleas."  It  is  dif- 
ferent from  these — a  sadness  more  subtle, 
more  bitter,  more  tenacious,  more  deep- 
seated;  it  is  an  emotional  nuance  that 
Loeffler  alone  has  felt  and  expressed. 

Despite  his  occasional  utterance  of 
more  serene  and  buoyant  moods,  he  is 
evidently  at  heart  one  of  ''the  children 
of  sorrow" — one  of  that  troubled  and 
spiritually  restless  clan  which  has  num- 
bered among  its  members  Leopardi  and 
Heine,  Poe  and  Rossetti  and  Mangan, 
Baudelaire  and  Verlaine,  Chopin,  Schu- 
mann, Tchaikovsky.  The  artist  in  whom 
sensibility  and  emotion  predominate  over 
aspiration  comes  inevitably  to  regard  the 
world  as  a  via  dolorosa  of  defeated 
dreams.  He  sees  love,  "beautiful  like 
the  autumn  evening,  dumb  like  the 
autumn  evening,  fading  like  the  autumn 
218 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

evening."  He  sees  beauty  and  desire, 
ardour  and  hope,  wane  with  the  inexor- 
able march  of  the  years;  he  sees  the 
spreading  of  "the  world's  slow  stain."  So 
that  he  comes  to  ask  himself:  Whence 
springs  that  profound  and  inscrutable 
melancholy  which  falls  upon  us  at  the 
moment  when  we  are  about  to  consum- 
mate some  long-cherished  and  ardently 
envisaged  dream?  Of  what  origin  are  the 
vague,  anonymous  regrets,  the  nameless 
misgivings,  the  mysterious  hesitancies, 
which  beset  us  at  such  a  time  and  stale 
the  wine  of  our  delight?  Why  is  it  that 
at  the  very  instant  when  we  behold  our 
dream  incarnate  in  the  warm  and  living 
present,  when  we  are  at  last  face  to  face 
with  it  in  all  its  glowing  and  longed-for 
actuality,  we  find  ourselves  afflicted  with 
a  sudden  numbness,  a  palsy  of  the  soul, 
so  that  happiness  has  passed  us  by  and  we 
have  not  felt  its  touch:  has  cheated  us 
while  in  the  act  of  seeming  to  appease? 
Is  it  ordained  that  our  desires  shall  never 
219 


NATURE    IN    MUSIC 

flower  for  us  in  their  perfection?  Is 
there  no  sustenance  for  the  dreaming 
heart  and  the  dream-filled  mind  but 
Dead  Sea  fruit? — It  would  seem  that  this 
is  so,  when  those  dreams,  those  desires, 
are  woven  of  that  fabric  which  is  dyed  in 
the  colours  of  mortality:  that  perishable 
vesture  with  which  men  seek  to  clothe 
themselves  in  happiness  or  peace.  It 
would  seem  that  the  joy  which  cometh  in 
the  morning  is  no  joy  at  all,  but  sorrow 
and  emptiness,  save  when  we  send  it  up 
to  God  in  songs  or  out  to  other  hearts  in 
selflessness.  For  it  is  given  to  any  of  us, 
miraculously  enough,  to  achieve,  if  only 
for  a  brief  unforgettable  moment,  the 
clarified  and  serene  and  infinitely  joyous 
vision  of  which  Plato  tells  us  in  the 
Phaedo,  whereby  we  may  share  the  felic- 
ity of  those  who  dwell  among  the  im- 
mortals— "who  see  the  moon  and  stars  as 
they  really  are,  and  whose  happiness  in 
other  matters  is  of  a  piece  with  this." 

220 


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